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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Geosparc announces partnership

Great news for our community members at Geosparc.

GEOSPARC announced at the Intertraffic conference a partnership in the development of data-driven mobility management.
A Geosparc platform trusted by numerous cities and municipalities across the Benelux region will now be powered by Mobilisis parking sensors.

More here

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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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Aloxy secures US patent

Aloxy is happy to announce the US patent is granted for the Aloxy valve position sensor.

Great news for our community members who are working hard on expanding in the US market.

Read the full article here

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Skyebase wins innovation award

Great news for our community members at Skyebase.

On the M+R fair in Antwerp, Skyebase was presented the innovation award with their new wall-and coating thickness measurement drone solution

A wonderful recognition for the Skyebase Team

Click here for more

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Partnership Inuits x Dockflow

Amazing news from our community.

Our community members at Inuits are investing in an other community member, Dockflow !

Kris Kerremans invests in this logistics company, and the Inuits community will support them with scaling the technology and developing a future-proof solution.

This is what the beacon is all about - companies getting together and coorperate

read here all about the partnership

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Event - ReThinking Newspace

Innovating earth observation starts with improving optics in micro- & nanosatellites, data processing through algorithms and embedded AI. Let's innovate NewSpace and start space commercialization, join ReThinking NewSpace on 29 March organized by @Lambda-X, @VerhaertMastersInInnovation, @VITO & @Aerospacelab. During this webinar their experts will share insights on EO application challenges.
4 sessions, 4 EO challenges 🌏
✔Providing daily global coverage
✔Developing optical designs for micro- & nanosatellites
✔Preserving data quality through in orbit calibration
✔Processing EO data using AI
Register now for this webinar on March 29th!
👉 https://bit.ly/3JS9Qyc

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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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Software AG announces the acquisition of Streamsets

Exciting news from our community members at Software AG.

They have announcement the agreement to acquire Streamsets Inc, a leader in data integration for the modern data stack.

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Blog 11 // Create your own shareable Tensorboard with authentication on GCP

In this blogpost ML6's ML engineer Tim De Smet explains how to create your own shareable Tensorboards with authentication on GCP in a cost-effective way. This post includes the Terraform setup so that the solution can be replicated with ease.

You can find the full blogpost here

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The Beacon announces new community members

After two low-profile years, The Beacon | Innovation Community has started onboarding new Community Members . Proximus is our first The Beacon Champion , startup Rollo is one of our newest residents, and powerhouses Siemens, Positive Thinking Company and Lab Box have reinforced the community!

You can find the members in our list and if you want to meet them feel free to sent victor, the community manager a message.

The February update will come very soon

The city of Antwerp presents new electric charging sations

Exciting news from the city of Antwerp.

he City of #Antwerp has presenting new electric charging stations in collaboration with TotalEnergies and community member GEOSPARC.
In order to meet the increasing demand for electric charging capacity, the city of Antwerp is stepping up its efforts. 💡

In the coming years, TotalEnergies will install and operate charging stations in the public domain. Geosparc is responsible for optimizing the use of the charging station infrastructure and will install sensors in the car parking. These register which spaces are occupied and for how long and are integrated into a smart city middleware data platform.

Congrats to all parties involved - a step further to a sustainable future

Read the full Article here

Article is in Dutch

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Port of Antwerp select the 6th NeTWorK for drone roll-out

Congrats to our partner Port of Antwerp, they have recruited the 6th NeTWorK consortium to help in the roll-out of a large-scale drone project.

The group made up of DroneMatrix, Proximus, and SkeyDrone will support the launch of the port's 'D-Hive – Operation drone capacity for the Port of Antwerp' project.

You can find the full article here

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Seafar in The Tijd

Our Community members at Seafar got an extensive interview in The Tijd.

They talked about Seafar itself and the future plans of the company

You can check the full article here.

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Cubitec selected for Scale.Cities initiative

Exciting news from our community members at Cubitec.

Cubitec has beeen selected as one of the 5 Antwerp scaleups for Scale.Cities.

The SCALE.CITIES initiative aims to test, scale and prove scaleups’ solutions in the food, energy, waste, and mobility domains.

Very exciting what comes next.

You can read the full post 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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Verhaert acquires AFCE

Exciting news from our community members at Verhaert.
To boost their customers’ capacity to innovate, they are proud to announce the acquisition of the AfCE - Academy for Corporate Entrepreneurship. With the shared vision of turning that statistic upside down, AfCE will complement Verhaert’s services by offering courses, incubation & acceleration programs, tools and services to support internal innovation.

More here

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Rombit raises 25 million

Amazing news from our community members at Rombit.

They have raised 25 million and with their series B funding round, led by the Belgian government, they are ready to scale their operations further and provide their customers the products to ensure real-time risk management.

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NxtPort launches movie to highlight activities

NxtPort international have launched a new movie to highlight their activities for ports.

You can check it 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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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

Website