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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Dockflow featured in Trends

Pauline van Ostaeyen, the co-founder of dockflow has given an in-depth interview about the journey that dockflow already has walked so far.

You can find the full interview here

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Port of Antwerp starts using drones to detect debris

One of the mail partners of The Beacon, The Port of Antwerp is deploying drones using an in-house developed machine vision model.

You'll find more about this exciting innovation here

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Cegeka aquires a stake in Solver Sweden

Exciting news from our community members at Cegeka.

Cegeka have acquired a majority stake in the data specialist Solver Sweden. This strategic partnership is part of Cegeka's strategy to respond to the ever-growing demand for data and AI partners.

Congrats to Cegeka for this milestone.

More here

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Aloxy expands into North America

Exciting news from our community members at Aloxy.

They are expanding into the North American market. This is another milestone on the growth path of Aloxy and strategically important to develop Their business in the US.

Congrats !

More information here

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ML6 nominated

Congrats to our community members at ML6.

Once again they are nominted for Trends gazellen East Flanders.

More info here

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TedX Talk - Dewi Van De Vyver

Finally !

The Tedx Talk of Dewi Van De Vyver, CEO of Flowpilots is online.

The talk is about 𝘄𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴, searching for 𝘀𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 and 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗶𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁.

Click here to watch the full version

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Helicus completes first remote drone flight

Amazing news from our community members at Helicus.

Helicus have completed the first long distance remotely controlled flight from the Helicus Command and Control Centre (C2C) at The Beacon

This flight forms the next step in the in-field test program, coupling drones with automated fleet ground control (C2C) enabling economic viable (medical) services by drone.

More about this amazing news here

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Rensendriessen construct vessels with Seafar technology

exciting news from our community members at Seafar.

Rensendriessen kicked off the new year with the construction of 10 semi-autonomous vessels using Seafar technology.

Nice to see that Seafar is having an impact in the maritime industry and that shipbuilding companies are using their technology.

More here

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CEO & Founder of Faktion interviewed by Bloovi magazine

The new CEO, since 6 months, Bart Baeyens and the founder & CTO at Faktion Joeri Van Steen were interviewed together by Bloovi ✨

As they talk about their own personal growth, they also talk about the growth of Faktion & their successful spin-offs Metamaze and Chatlayer by Sinch.
Bart & Joeri explain insights in their background and vision, which also shows the balance between them and how they both found their passion.

Inspiring interview, you can find the full version here

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Skyebase featured in VRT news

Last weekend our community members at Skyebase were featured in the programme " de markt " on VRT news.

The CEO talked about Crowdlending and how it is helping Skyebase achieve it goals.

Watch the interview here

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New General manager at Startups.be / scale-ups.eu

Exciting news from our community members at Start-ups.be &Scale-ups.eu

Starting this week, they will have a new general manager at the helm, Leen Antheunis.

More here

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CEO of Flow Pilots nominated for IT person of the year

Congrats to our community members at flow pilot.

Their CEO, Dewi Van De Vyver has been nominated for IT person of the year for the second year in a row

More here

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Skyebase featured in Gazet of Antwerp

Our Community member Skyebase is featured in the gazet of antwerpen regarding a very interesting topic

--> Crowdlending.

You'll find the article here

Website

Managing Director of ML6 nominated

Exciting news from ML6.

Managing director, Nicolas Deruytter, has been nominated by Computable to become "IT person of the year 2022".

Congrats to our community members for this nomination !

More here.

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Citymesh maps bustle in Bruges & Ghent shopping streets

An exciting news form our community members at Citymesh.

From January to March 2022, a special pilot project will run in Bruges and Ghent: smart technology will be used to measure how busy it is in various shopping streets. Citymesh's Footfall AI is one of the solutions that will support the city of Bruges and the city of Ghent in the counting of passers-by.

Read all about the project here.

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Bagaar Launches second version of Telraam

Great news from our community member, Bagaar.

They are proud to present the second version of Telraam, a home traffic monitoring device they have developed for Transport & Mobility Leuven.

Over 1600 devices of version 1 are active all around Europe and the US. With version 2, they want to offer democratised access to traffic data all across the world.

Read the full case here

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Faktion's AI project selected for the AMAI campagne

Good news for our community members at Faktion.

Their AI project has been selected for further development in 2022 for the AMAI campagne.

exciting times ahead !

Read all about it here

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Dockflow renews partnership with Remant Cool Logistics

Good news for our Community members at Dockflow.

They have renewed their partnership with Remant Cool Logistics.

Dockflow allows Remant Cool teams to automatically and accurately monitor free time and demurrage costs. In turn, Remant Cool can optimize its customers' costs.

More here

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The Grain launches Checkmate

Our Community members at The Grain launched their lastest solution, Checkmate.

Checkmate is a solution designed to deal with the specific challenges of production planning & scheduling for manufacturing companies.

Want to know more ?

You can read their white paper on accelerated planning here.

Website

Imec team wins international conference on indoor positioning

Congratulations to the Imec-WAVES team for winning this year's International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation localization competition with novel algorithms for achieving high-accuracy positioning with Ultra-Wideband in industrial indoor environments.

Well done Imec !

Congratulate them here.

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