Canvas | Community | The Beacon

Headquartered in Leuven (Belgium) and with research sites across Belgium, in the Netherlands, Taiwan and the USA, an rep offices in China and Japan, imec leverages its state-of-the-art R&D infrastructure and its team of about 4,000 expert scientists, to drive open innovation across the globe. They unite world-industry leaders, Flanders-based and international companies, start-ups, and academia and knowledge centers, for R&D in nano-electronics and digital technologies, including advanced semiconductor scaling, silicon photonics, smart health, smart energy, smart mobility and smart cities solutions, artificial intelligence, beyond-5G and sensing technologies and more.

Next to its R&D offering, imec also leverages its expertise and large international industry network to support smaller organizations that have limited in-house R&D resources as well as larger companies with their innovation process from initial idea to fully functioning product, from the design of a product or chip, to prototyping, testing and optimizing, and manufacturing.

Finally, imec supports tech start-ups and scale-ups with a tailored offering. The imec.istart program is a business acceleration program that provides tech entrepreneurs with specialized coaching, facilities and overall support to help them grow their businesses, while the imec.scale-ups program focuses on larger innovative tech scale-ups looking to conquer the European market.

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Commissioned by the Flemish government, Lantis is building connections that make the city and region flourish. Lantis is responsible for the realisation of the Oosterweel connection, which will increase prosperity and improve the quality of life. Lantis is contributing to this by promoting mobility, including the construction of numerous bicycle connections and multimodal junctions on the city outskirts of Antwerp.

Lantis strives for operational excellence in order to carry out projects as efficiently as possible and deliver quality. Thanks to intensive cooperation with the surrounding area, the organisation works transparently and with a focus on results. Innovation and transformation ensure future-oriented projects with a lasting impact on the dynamics of the region. This is the Lantis way of successfully realising large projects in an urban environment.

Lantis stands for Liveable Antwerp through Innovation and Cooperation and is a public limited company. The day-to-day management is in the hands of the management committee led by managing director Luc Hellemans. David Van Herreweghe chairs the board of directors.

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As Europe’s second-largest port and largest integrated chemical cluster, the Port of Antwerp Bruges is a major lifeline for the Belgian economy: annually around 238 million tonnes of international maritime freight are handled. The Port of Antwerp Bruges accounts, directly and indirectly, for a total of around 143.000 jobs and more than €20 billion added value.

Innovation and digitisation enable our mission to be ‘a home port for a sustainable future’ as we aim to flexibly respond to a rapidly evolving maritime market. By supporting The Beacon, we want to ensure that our port platform finds relevant points of contact and vice versa. Furthermore, we want to facilitate the exchange effect created through the ecosystem being built around The Beacon.

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The city of Antwerp welcomes businesses, researchers, citizens and city officials to experiment with smart technologies that aim to make urban life more enjoyable and sustainable. Antwerp is a living lab where solutions are tested and co-created with its inhabitants. The city is home to highly innovative businesses and with 171 nationalities that live in Antwerp, it is above all a very diverse, and international city. The Ecosystem in Antwerp is developing rapidly, over the past years the amount of start-ups and scaleups in Antwerp doubled.

Innovative companies are the driving force behind the Antwerp knowledge economy. Their growth is crucial for our future. The City of Antwerp therefore strongly believes in the power of digital networking and is developing an ecosystem for digital innovation in which large and small businesses, startups, scaleups, researchers and capital providers with an interest in the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence can meet each other. Thanks to the cross-pollination that occurs in The Beacon, innovative products are developed that are relevant to Antwerp’s ‘smart city’ ambitions and to our financial stakeholders: industry and logistics.

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The University of Antwerp is a research university where pioneering, innovative research is conducted at an international level. Research and education are closely linked, with 20,000 students and 6000 staff spread across our nine faculties. As a driving force in the Antwerp innovation ecosystem, innovation is a constant focus.

The Beacon is the university’s pioneering pre-incubation structure for the domain of Metropolitanism, Smart City, Mobility & Logistics. It houses the IDLab research group and the Design Sciences Hub.

The IDLab research group of the University of Antwerp and imec performs fundamental and applied research on Wireless technologies, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things. IDLab, headed by prof. Steven Latré, targets the most daunting challenges industry is facing to deliver digital transformation, connecting everything and extracting high value from data. Bringing researchers and industrial partners together at the same location facilitates knowledge transfer and enables the cross-fertilization and co-creation insights on smart cities, IoT and AI towards the industrial partners in The Beacon.

The Design Sciences Hub of the Faculty of Design Sciences is an interdisciplinary innovation and valorization lab. They offer design solutions for urban challenges and wicked problems in the triangle of urban planning, built environment, and urban health.

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Blog 13 // Urban Sense

Urban Sense is the consortium between Cegeka and Sirus and offers a data platform on which cities and municipalities can disclose all possible types of data.

In this Blog - Cegeka and Sirus go in depth on the dataplatform that urban sense offers.

Click here for the full blog

Blog is in dutch

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Blog 12 // Introduction to Jax

In this 12th blog post by ML6's software engineer, Jasper Van den Bossche gives an introduction to JAX, a machine learning framework by Google AI Research. He explains how JAX works, how it is different from Tensorflow/Pytorch and explain why he thinks it is worth adding to your arsenal of tools as a machine learning engineer.

Read the full blog here

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Blog 10 // Open source podcast with Aloxy

In our 10th blogpost Aloxy's CCO, Frank Gielissen and CTO, Glenn Ergeerts went on a podcqst show discussing their approach to open source and explained more about Aloxy and their IIOT solution for annual valve monitoring.

You can listen the full podcast here

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Blog 9 // The safety concerns about 5G

In our ninth blog, Our community members at Citymesh wrote about the health & safety concerns about 5G and the risks attached to it.

Two arguments keep coming up: the fact that 5G's radio frequency would be harmful, and the fact that 5G requires a larger number of antennas than its predecessors. Citymesh will take a closer look at these arguments and what scientific research on the subject tells us.

Note : The Blog is in Dutch

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Blog 8 // how to tackle the big challenges as we move into the era of 6G

In the eight blog Imec's Maikel Peeters explains in a virtual talk how to tackle the big challenges as we move into the era of 6G pre-competitive research.

You can find the full presentation here.

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Blog 7 // Vertex AI Tensorboard alternative for smaller budgets

In the 7th blogpost - ML6's ML engineer Maximilian Gartz takes a look at the new Vertex AI managed TensorBoard pricing model and provides an alternative, serverless and cost-efficient solution on GCP

You'll find the full blog here

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Blog 6 // The definition of the perfect product

In the sixth blog you'll find the definition of the perfect product and the innovation principles behind it.

Verhaert's Frederik wouters discusses how data-based intangible innovation can improve user experience, product efficiency & process, to give you a competitive advantage.

Read the full blog here

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Blog 5 // How do we prevent our developers from waiting too long

Our community members at BubblyDoo are starting the BubblyDoo Engineering Blog where they will dive into the most interesting programming topics at their company.

Want to know more about the plugin Founder & CTO Hans Otto wrote to keep their deploy times short?

More here

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Blog 4 // ML6's take on the importance of explainable AI

In this blog, ethical AI expert Caroline Adam from ML6 takes a look at the importance of explainability for building trust and realising business value with AI.

Read the full blog here

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Blog 3 // How Inuits intoduce CD/CI to engineer teams

In this blog Co-founder & CTO of Inuits, Kris Buytaert talks about how you can Introduce CD/CI to engineers teams.

Listen to the full podcast here

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Blog 2 // How ML6 decided to maintain connexion

In this second blogpos ML6 Engineer Ruwan Lambrichts explores how the connexion framework, created by Zalando, facilitates API-first design with Python.

He takes a look at what the advantages are of API-first and compare with the opposite approach of “code-first”. Based on a benchmarking exercise and our values, he dives deeper into why they are helping to maintain connexion.

Read the full blog here

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Blog 1 // How ML6 foster innovation during the Xmas period

In this Blogpost - ML6 talks about how they foster innovation during the most beautiful period of the year.
Their Machine Learning Engineer Florentijn Degroote talks you through how they make that happen, for four years in a row already!

Read the full blog here

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