“Signal Processing in the AI era” was the tagline of this year’s IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, taking place in Rhodes, Greece.

In this context, Brent de Weerdt, Xiangyu Yang, Boris Joukovsky, Alex Stergiou and Nikos Deligiannis presented ETRO’s research during poster sessions and oral presentations, with novel ways to process and understand graph, video, and audio data. Nikos Deligiannis chaired a session on Graph Deep Learning, attended the IEEE T-IP Editorial Board Meeting, and had the opportunity to meet with collaborators from the VUB-Duke-Ugent-UCL joint lab.

Featured articles:

• De Weerdt, B. et al., “Designing Transformer Networks for Sparse Recovery of Sequential Data Using Deep Unfolding” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10094712)
• Yang X. et al., “Relevance Propagation through Deep Conditional Random Fields” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10095075)
• Stergiou A. et al., “Play it back: Iterative attention for audio recognition” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10096532, developed at the University of Bristol)

On 26 October 2026 at 16:00, Alican Çağlar will defend their PhD entitled “LOW-POWER CRYOGENIC CMOS INTERFACES FOR SCALABLE QUANTUM COMPUTERS”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room D.2.01 or online via this link.

Realizing a fault-tolerant quantum computer based on superconducting or spin quantum bits (qubits) requires millions of physical qubits operating below 100 mK in dilution refrigerators. In the early years of quantum processor research and development, qubits were controlled using room temperature electronics due to their small scale. However, with the rapid increase in the number of qubits in the last decade, the massive amount of cabling required between mK temperatures and room temperature has become a bottleneck. To overcome this limitation, CMOS electronics, the technology underlying modern microprocessors, are increasingly used in close proximity to qubits at cryogenic temperatures, such as the mK and 4 K stages of dilution refrigerators. These circuits are commonly referred to as cryogenic CMOS (cryo-CMOS). The main challenge for scalable cryo-CMOS control electronics is the very low power budget in dilution refrigerators, due to their limited cooling power.

In the first phase of this research, a system-on-chip (SoC) for qubit readout at 4 K was developed using 28 nm bulk CMOS technology. The SoC employs a full zero intermediate frequency architecture and operates in the 6-8 GHz frequency range at 4 K. The readout SoC achieves lower power consumption with a noise performance comparable to prior works.

In the second phase, CMOS circuits operating at mK temperatures were investigated. In this context, two prototypes, a DC demultiplexer and a charge-redistribution DC digital-to-analog converter (DAC) implemented in 65 nm bulk CMOS technology, have been designed to alleviate the DC wiring bottleneck for spin qubit biasing. Thanks to their low power consumption, they enable the biasing of over 100,000 qubits at 100 mK.

Help ons het onderzoek naar beter lopen vooruit te helpen

Loop je zo?

Neem dan contact met ons op via ✉️elena.botti@vub.be

Twijfel je nog? Je hoeft geen zelfdiagnose te stellen, laten we samen een videogesprek inplannen! Stuur ons een e-mail naar elena.botti@vub.be en wij kijken of je in aanmerking komt.

Wat u kunt verwachten

We willen loopanalyse eenvoudiger en toegankelijker maken. We vergelijken een kleine draagbare bewegingssensor (IMU) met een motion-capture-systeem voor laboratoriumgebruik (Vicon) om de methoden voor het analyseren van verschillende looppatronen te verbeteren. Op de onderstaande foto’s ziet u de opstelling: de IMU is de kleine sensor op de onderrug van de patiënt en voor Vicon moeten er kleine markeringen op uw lichaam worden aangebracht.

Samenvatting

📍Eén bezoek aan het Brubotics Rehabilitation Research Center (BRRC) – Laarbeeklaan 121, 1090 Jette, Brussel

⏱️Ongeveer 2 uur vanaf het moment dat je binnenkomt tot het einde van de opnamesessie

🎽Draag een sportbroekje of ondergoed, zodat we de markeringen kunnen aanbrengen. Je loopt op blote voeten

🏁 15 wandelingen van 10 meter: 5 langzaam, 5 normaal en 5 snel, in je eigen tempo

✔️Klaar! Voor je het weet ben je klaar, geen behandeling en geen vervolgafspraak. Je hebt bijgedragen aan het onderzoek!🔬

Contactgegevens

Doctoraatsstudent Elena Botti

elena.botti@vub.be

Dr. Redona Brahimetaj

redona.brahimetaj@vub.be

Prof. Bart Jansen

bart.jansen@vub.be

Directeur Prof. Eva Swinnen

eva.swinnen@vub.be

Aidez-nous à faire avancer la recherche pour une meilleure marche

Vous marchez comme ça?

Alors contactez-nous à l’adresse ✉️elena.botti@vub.be

Pas sûr(e)? Inutile de vous diagnostiquer vous-même, organisons un appel vidéo ensemble! Envoyez-nous un e-mail à l’adresse elena.botti@vub.be et nous vérifierons si vous êtes éligible.

À quoi s’attendre

Nous souhaitons rendre l’analyse de la marche plus simple et plus accessible. Nous comparons un petit capteur de mouvement portable (IMU) à un système de capture de mouvement de laboratoire (Vicon) afin d’améliorer les méthodes d’analyse des différents types de marche. Le dispositif est visible sur les photos ci-dessous : l’IMU est le petit capteur placé dans le bas du dos du patient, tandis que le système Vicon nécessite la pose de petits marqueurs sur votre corps.

En bref

📍Une seule visite au Brubotics Rehabilitation Research Center (BRRC) – Avenue du Laerbeek 121, 1090 Jette, Bruxelles

⏱️Environ 2 heures, depuis votre arrivée jusqu’à la fin de la séance d’enregistrement

🎽Portez un short de sport ou des sous-vêtements afin que nous puissions placer les marqueurs. Vous marcherez pieds nus

🏁 15 allers-retours de 10 mètres : 5 lents, 5 normaux et 5 rapides, à votre rythme

✔️C’est terminé ! Vous aurez fini avant même de vous en rendre compte, sans traitement ni suivi. Vous aurez contribué à la recherche !🔬

Coordonnées

Doctorante Elena Botti

elena.botti@vub.be

Dr. Redona Brahimetaj

redona.brahimetaj@vub.be

Prof. Bart Jansen

bart.jansen@vub.be

Directrice Prof. Eva Swinnen

eva.swinnen@vub.be

On 23 October 2026 at 16:00, Brent De Weerdt will defend their PhD entitled “Interpretable Transformer Networks for Compressed Sensing, Representation Learning, and Distributed Source Coding”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room LIC.0.04 or online via this link.

The current trend in artificial intelligence, and deep learning in particular, is to design increasingly large and complex models. Although these models achieve high accuracy, they require large datasets, high computational budgets, and often remain difficult to interpret. This thesis addresses these limitations by leveraging theoretical knowledge and data priors to design lightweight, performant, and inherently interpretable Transformer-based deep learning models.

The work first considers signal acquisition through compressed sensing. Using deep unfolding, the thesis designs neural networks for signal reconstruction from compressed measurements. By incorporating sparsity and temporal correlation, it develops interpretable Transformer models that reconstruct signals more accurately and efficiently than existing methods. The thesis then studies compact and privacy-preserving representations of human pose trajectories in video using contrastive learning and generative modelling, enabling anomaly detection through deviations from learned normal motion patterns. Finally, the thesis addresses distributed source coding, where correlated observations from multiple devices can be compressed more efficiently by exploiting inter-source dependencies. Building on LDPCA codes, it proposes a multi-rate Transformer decoder for Slepian-Wolf decoding that outperforms traditional decoders and reduces communication cost compared with alternative distributed compression methods.

Overall, the thesis develops deep learning architectures that incorporate signal processing, information theory, and data-specific prior knowledge, achieving state-of-the-art performance across several tasks while reducing the computational budget by at least an order of magnitude in most cases.

The planner you wish you had when facing a project deadline!

Nothing special. Anyone could make one — if only they had the time!

Need a quick project timeline without struggling with complicated planning software?

This simple Excel sheet lets you create and update project roadmaps on the fly. Just enter your tasks, dates and milestones, and the chart builds itself. Change something, and it updates automatically.

A few innocent VBA macros do the work behind the scenes. No installation, no complicated setup.

Download it, enable macros and start planning. Instructions are included in the Excel file.

Download Excel Gantt Planner

On 30 October 2026 at 16:00, Silvia Zaccardi will defend their PhD entitled “Beyond the lab: Towards portable clinical motion analysis with observer-worn head-mounted displays”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room LIC.0.04 or online via this link.

Human movement analysis provides valuable information for assessing patients and monitoring rehabilitation. However, accurate measurements typically require expensive equipment in specialised laboratories, limiting their use in everyday clinical practice.

This thesis explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Mixed Reality (MR) headsets could make movement analysis more affordable, portable, and accessible. The long-term vision is a system in which a physiotherapist wears an MR headset while a patient walks or performs exercises in front of them. Cameras built into the headset would track the patient’s movements, while relevant information, such as joint angles and walking characteristics, would be displayed directly in the physiotherapist’s field of view, supporting clinical assessment in real time.

Towards this vision, the research proposes two approaches to capturing human movement using the headset’s built-in cameras and sensors. The first uses AI to estimate body movement directly from video, without requiring physical markers, while the second uses small reflective markers attached to the patient’s body to improve tracking accuracy. The thesis also explores AI algorithms to estimate the forces between the feet and the ground from movement data alone, potentially reducing the need for specialised force-measuring plates embedded in the laboratory floor.

The findings demonstrate the potential of these technologies while highlighting the trade-offs between measurement accuracy, ease of use, and real-time performance. Overall, this thesis contributes towards making objective movement analysis more accessible beyond specialised laboratories.

Congratulations to Simon on this achievemment!

Near-field 3D SAR imaging with no constraints on motion using physics-informed deep learning

Simon’s research focuses on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), a technique that exploits motion to achieve high-resolution radar imaging without requiring large antenna arrays. However, traditional SAR methods rely on restrictive motion assumptions that limit their use in emerging applications such as autonomous navigation and drone-based sensing. Simon will address this gap by developing a physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for 3D imaging under arbitrary motion, which will be validated through real-world drone-based radar experiments.

Make appointment

Find out when each doctor is available in the online agenda (MYA). 

Regular patients log in with their MYA-account. If you don’t have one yet, you can create one and it will have to be approved by one of the doctors. If you are already registered at the practice, your MYA-account will be automatically approved.

Or copy paste this link into your browser: https://shorturl.at/bdrBF

VUB students and staff can log in with their VUB account.

Or copy paste this link into your browser: https://shorturl.at/mosE8

Cancel appointment

You can cancel it yourself in the online calendar, up until 24 hours before your appointment. Want to cancel on the same day? Please contact us via phone.

Appointment on the same day

are available from 8:00AM

Appointments for the next day

become available 15 hours ahead of time

Price

A consultation costs €33.5

Rates

The University Group Practice charges subsidised rates: all consultations between 8:00AM and 6:00PM are charged at the subsidised rate of € 33 for 10 minutes. If further examinations are necessary, there may be a surcharge. 

• Those affiliated to a Belgian national insurance scheme (“mututaliteit”) pay the patient contribution of maximum € 6. The remaining amount is covered by the legitimate reimbursement from the R.I.Z.I.V.
• Individuals without Belgian national insurance scheme pay the full amount and receive a certificate of the care provided. They themselves verify with their health insurance company whether they can reclaim the amount paid.

Payments:

• Bancontact: Dr. Desmet
• Payconiq or QR code: Dr. Foukoua and Dr. Hatam
• Cash: all doctors

Care offer

• Illness, treatment of wounds and assistance for a range of medical issues
• Blood sampling and analysis
• Minor surgery
• Birth control and STD screening
• Travel medicine and vaccinations
• Sports medicine and certificates
• Preventive cervical, breast and colorectal cancer screening
• Monitoring of pregnancies, babies and children
• Monitoring of chronic conditions
• Repeat prescriptions
• Guidance to quit smoking
• End-of-life counselling

From 3 November 2026, you will submit your expense claims through FOX Expenses, using SAP Concur. This means we will say goodbye to RACSWEB as the system for submitting and processing staff expenses. FOX Expenses makes it easier to submit, track and approve your expense claims. In this article, you can find out what is changing, why we are making this switch and what you need to know to get started smoothly.

https://vub.sharepoint.com/sites/PUB_DF/SitePages/Submit-your-expenses-via-FOX-from-3-November.aspx

What is changing?

As mentioned above, from 3 November FOX Expenses will make managing your expense claims easier.

• Submit expenses from your computer or smartphone. Simply take a photo of your receipt or supporting document. FOX Expenses automatically recognises the key information, so you have less to enter manually.
• Claim allowances, such as mileage or daily allowances.
• Allocate your expense claim to the correct budget.
• Automatically send your expense claim to the correct approver, in line with the four-eyes principle.
• Track the status of your expense claim. You can see at any time where your claim is in the process and who still needs to approve it.
• Process credit card transactions by adding the required supporting documents.
• Manage expenses on the go using the mobile app.

Why are we updating the process?

The move from RACSWEB to FOX Expenses is part of a broader transformation programme through which VUB is gradually modernising its financial processes and support.

The overarching FOX programme is the backbone of this transformation. With FOX, we are moving towards a more modern and integrated way of working, supported by digital technology and artificial intelligence. This will make our financial processes more efficient, support the university’s continued growth and make financial information available more quickly and easily.

For expense claims, this means:

• Faster – Less manual work and shorter waiting times for reimbursement.
• In line with VUB rules – Your expense claims are processed in accordance with VUB’s expense policy.
• Clearer – You can follow the approval process and see at any time where your expense claim stands and who still needs to approve it. Budget holders also have a clear overview.
• Available anywhere – You can also submit expenses through the mobile app. For example, you can take a photo of your receipt immediately after making a purchase instead of having to keep it until later.

Would you like to delegate the submission or approval of an expense claim? A separate application is available for this. More information about delegations and how to set them up will be included in the instructions available when FOX Expenses launches.

Which system powers FOX Expenses?

FOX Expenses uses SAP Concur Expense. You will therefore still see the SAP Concur or Concur name and logo in the application, mobile app and automated emails. This is perfectly normal: SAP Concur is the application VUB uses within FOX to process expense claims.

How will the transition work?

To ensure a smooth transition from RACSWEB to FOX Expenses, there will be a short period during which you will temporarily be unable to submit new expense claims.

• Up to and including 30 October – You can still submit your expenses through RACSWEB.
• From 31 October up to and including 2 November – During this period, you will temporarily be unable to submit new expense claims through either RACSWEB or FOX Expenses.
• From 3 November onwards – Submit your expense claims through FOX Expenses.

What will still be handled through RACSWEB?

RACSWEB will not disappear completely. After 3 November, reimbursements to third parties and the creation of purchase orders will continue to be handled through RACSWEB.

Help with the transition

We are providing several forms of support to help you get started with FOX Expenses.

Shortly before launch, you will find instructional videos on SharePoint covering the different topics. These will show you step by step how to submit and track your expenses through FOX Expenses. A user guide will also be available.

Still have questions after watching the instructional videos and reading the user guide? Email foxconcur@vub.be. The Finance Department will deal with your question as quickly as possible.

Manuel Montoya obtained a 4-year FWO scholarship for his PhD research: Efficient algorithms for Partially Coherent Light Propagation in Computer Generated Holography. His promoter is David Blinder.

Prof. Nikos Deligiannis (VUB-ETRO) and Prof. Jean-François Argacha (UZ Brussel-CHVZ) presented VUB’s activities and outcomes within Work Package 3 of the Horizon ENACT project at AIOTI Days 2026, taking place in Florence on 28–29 September 2026.

Prof. Deligiannis gave a talk entitled “AI Models for Population-Based Exposome-Driven Hospitalisation Risk Prediction in ENACT,” highlighting the use of AI models to assess exposome-related hospitalisation risks (attached poster).

Prof. Argacha presented “Assessing Exposome-related Risk of Non-Communicable Diseases in ENACT: From Myocardial Infarction to the Next Steps,” focusing on the assessment of exposome-related risks for non-communicable diseases and future research directions within ENACT.

More information about AIOTI Days 2026 is available at https://aioti.eu/aioti-days-2026/.

More information about the ENACT project is available at https://enact-he.eu/

Gisteren hebben we tijdens een zonovergoten avond het ecosysteem van Green Energy Park vzw en FACT – VUB samengebracht voor een interessant netwerkevent.

Een inspirerende uitleg over onze ambities, de visie van Siemens over het belang van intense samenwerking, overtuigende pitches van de onderzoeksgroepen van FACT – VUB, een infosessie over het Interreg-project EMR H2-HUBs, verschillende demo’s … een mooi programma waar iedereen zijn gading in kon vinden.

De avond werd afgesloten onder een stralende zon waardoor het netwerken net dat tikkeltje aangenamer was.

Bedankt aan onze sprekers Inne Peersman, Siperius Yves, Maarten Messagie, Cedric De Cauwer, Gabriela Barrera, Md Sazzad Hosen, Christof Devriendt, Aurélie Bellemans, Lukas Berger, Tom Van Assche, Johan Stiens, Hubert Rahier en onze demostandhouders Priva, Fluvius, Allspark, Flux50, ABB, EVERGi, ETRO VUB, Physical Chemistry and Polymer Science en VUB Architectural Engineering.

“Signal Processing in the AI era” was the tagline of this year’s IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, taking place in Rhodes, Greece.

In this context, Brent de Weerdt, Xiangyu Yang, Boris Joukovsky, Alex Stergiou and Nikos Deligiannis presented ETRO’s research during poster sessions and oral presentations, with novel ways to process and understand graph, video, and audio data. Nikos Deligiannis chaired a session on Graph Deep Learning, attended the IEEE T-IP Editorial Board Meeting, and had the opportunity to meet with collaborators from the VUB-Duke-Ugent-UCL joint lab.

Featured articles:

• De Weerdt, B. et al., “Designing Transformer Networks for Sparse Recovery of Sequential Data Using Deep Unfolding” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10094712)
• Yang X. et al., “Relevance Propagation through Deep Conditional Random Fields” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10095075)
• Stergiou A. et al., “Play it back: Iterative attention for audio recognition” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10096532, developed at the University of Bristol)

On 26 October 2026 at 16:00, Alican Çağlar will defend their PhD entitled “LOW-POWER CRYOGENIC CMOS INTERFACES FOR SCALABLE QUANTUM COMPUTERS”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room D.2.01 or online via this link.

Realizing a fault-tolerant quantum computer based on superconducting or spin quantum bits (qubits) requires millions of physical qubits operating below 100 mK in dilution refrigerators. In the early years of quantum processor research and development, qubits were controlled using room temperature electronics due to their small scale. However, with the rapid increase in the number of qubits in the last decade, the massive amount of cabling required between mK temperatures and room temperature has become a bottleneck. To overcome this limitation, CMOS electronics, the technology underlying modern microprocessors, are increasingly used in close proximity to qubits at cryogenic temperatures, such as the mK and 4 K stages of dilution refrigerators. These circuits are commonly referred to as cryogenic CMOS (cryo-CMOS). The main challenge for scalable cryo-CMOS control electronics is the very low power budget in dilution refrigerators, due to their limited cooling power.

In the first phase of this research, a system-on-chip (SoC) for qubit readout at 4 K was developed using 28 nm bulk CMOS technology. The SoC employs a full zero intermediate frequency architecture and operates in the 6-8 GHz frequency range at 4 K. The readout SoC achieves lower power consumption with a noise performance comparable to prior works.

In the second phase, CMOS circuits operating at mK temperatures were investigated. In this context, two prototypes, a DC demultiplexer and a charge-redistribution DC digital-to-analog converter (DAC) implemented in 65 nm bulk CMOS technology, have been designed to alleviate the DC wiring bottleneck for spin qubit biasing. Thanks to their low power consumption, they enable the biasing of over 100,000 qubits at 100 mK.

Help ons het onderzoek naar beter lopen vooruit te helpen

Loop je zo?

Neem dan contact met ons op via ✉️elena.botti@vub.be

Twijfel je nog? Je hoeft geen zelfdiagnose te stellen, laten we samen een videogesprek inplannen! Stuur ons een e-mail naar elena.botti@vub.be en wij kijken of je in aanmerking komt.

Wat u kunt verwachten

We willen loopanalyse eenvoudiger en toegankelijker maken. We vergelijken een kleine draagbare bewegingssensor (IMU) met een motion-capture-systeem voor laboratoriumgebruik (Vicon) om de methoden voor het analyseren van verschillende looppatronen te verbeteren. Op de onderstaande foto’s ziet u de opstelling: de IMU is de kleine sensor op de onderrug van de patiënt en voor Vicon moeten er kleine markeringen op uw lichaam worden aangebracht.

Samenvatting

📍Eén bezoek aan het Brubotics Rehabilitation Research Center (BRRC) – Laarbeeklaan 121, 1090 Jette, Brussel

⏱️Ongeveer 2 uur vanaf het moment dat je binnenkomt tot het einde van de opnamesessie

🎽Draag een sportbroekje of ondergoed, zodat we de markeringen kunnen aanbrengen. Je loopt op blote voeten

🏁 15 wandelingen van 10 meter: 5 langzaam, 5 normaal en 5 snel, in je eigen tempo

✔️Klaar! Voor je het weet ben je klaar, geen behandeling en geen vervolgafspraak. Je hebt bijgedragen aan het onderzoek!🔬

Contactgegevens

Doctoraatsstudent Elena Botti

elena.botti@vub.be

Dr. Redona Brahimetaj

redona.brahimetaj@vub.be

Prof. Bart Jansen

bart.jansen@vub.be

Directeur Prof. Eva Swinnen

eva.swinnen@vub.be

Aidez-nous à faire avancer la recherche pour une meilleure marche

Vous marchez comme ça?

Alors contactez-nous à l’adresse ✉️elena.botti@vub.be

Pas sûr(e)? Inutile de vous diagnostiquer vous-même, organisons un appel vidéo ensemble! Envoyez-nous un e-mail à l’adresse elena.botti@vub.be et nous vérifierons si vous êtes éligible.

À quoi s’attendre

Nous souhaitons rendre l’analyse de la marche plus simple et plus accessible. Nous comparons un petit capteur de mouvement portable (IMU) à un système de capture de mouvement de laboratoire (Vicon) afin d’améliorer les méthodes d’analyse des différents types de marche. Le dispositif est visible sur les photos ci-dessous : l’IMU est le petit capteur placé dans le bas du dos du patient, tandis que le système Vicon nécessite la pose de petits marqueurs sur votre corps.

En bref

📍Une seule visite au Brubotics Rehabilitation Research Center (BRRC) – Avenue du Laerbeek 121, 1090 Jette, Bruxelles

⏱️Environ 2 heures, depuis votre arrivée jusqu’à la fin de la séance d’enregistrement

🎽Portez un short de sport ou des sous-vêtements afin que nous puissions placer les marqueurs. Vous marcherez pieds nus

🏁 15 allers-retours de 10 mètres : 5 lents, 5 normaux et 5 rapides, à votre rythme

✔️C’est terminé ! Vous aurez fini avant même de vous en rendre compte, sans traitement ni suivi. Vous aurez contribué à la recherche !🔬

Coordonnées

Doctorante Elena Botti

elena.botti@vub.be

Dr. Redona Brahimetaj

redona.brahimetaj@vub.be

Prof. Bart Jansen

bart.jansen@vub.be

Directrice Prof. Eva Swinnen

eva.swinnen@vub.be

On 23 October 2026 at 16:00, Brent De Weerdt will defend their PhD entitled “Interpretable Transformer Networks for Compressed Sensing, Representation Learning, and Distributed Source Coding”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room LIC.0.04 or online via this link.

The current trend in artificial intelligence, and deep learning in particular, is to design increasingly large and complex models. Although these models achieve high accuracy, they require large datasets, high computational budgets, and often remain difficult to interpret. This thesis addresses these limitations by leveraging theoretical knowledge and data priors to design lightweight, performant, and inherently interpretable Transformer-based deep learning models.

The work first considers signal acquisition through compressed sensing. Using deep unfolding, the thesis designs neural networks for signal reconstruction from compressed measurements. By incorporating sparsity and temporal correlation, it develops interpretable Transformer models that reconstruct signals more accurately and efficiently than existing methods. The thesis then studies compact and privacy-preserving representations of human pose trajectories in video using contrastive learning and generative modelling, enabling anomaly detection through deviations from learned normal motion patterns. Finally, the thesis addresses distributed source coding, where correlated observations from multiple devices can be compressed more efficiently by exploiting inter-source dependencies. Building on LDPCA codes, it proposes a multi-rate Transformer decoder for Slepian-Wolf decoding that outperforms traditional decoders and reduces communication cost compared with alternative distributed compression methods.

Overall, the thesis develops deep learning architectures that incorporate signal processing, information theory, and data-specific prior knowledge, achieving state-of-the-art performance across several tasks while reducing the computational budget by at least an order of magnitude in most cases.

The planner you wish you had when facing a project deadline!

Nothing special. Anyone could make one — if only they had the time!

Need a quick project timeline without struggling with complicated planning software?

This simple Excel sheet lets you create and update project roadmaps on the fly. Just enter your tasks, dates and milestones, and the chart builds itself. Change something, and it updates automatically.

A few innocent VBA macros do the work behind the scenes. No installation, no complicated setup.

Download it, enable macros and start planning. Instructions are included in the Excel file.

Download Excel Gantt Planner

On 30 October 2026 at 16:00, Silvia Zaccardi will defend their PhD entitled “Beyond the lab: Towards portable clinical motion analysis with observer-worn head-mounted displays”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room LIC.0.04 or online via this link.

Human movement analysis provides valuable information for assessing patients and monitoring rehabilitation. However, accurate measurements typically require expensive equipment in specialised laboratories, limiting their use in everyday clinical practice.

This thesis explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Mixed Reality (MR) headsets could make movement analysis more affordable, portable, and accessible. The long-term vision is a system in which a physiotherapist wears an MR headset while a patient walks or performs exercises in front of them. Cameras built into the headset would track the patient’s movements, while relevant information, such as joint angles and walking characteristics, would be displayed directly in the physiotherapist’s field of view, supporting clinical assessment in real time.

Towards this vision, the research proposes two approaches to capturing human movement using the headset’s built-in cameras and sensors. The first uses AI to estimate body movement directly from video, without requiring physical markers, while the second uses small reflective markers attached to the patient’s body to improve tracking accuracy. The thesis also explores AI algorithms to estimate the forces between the feet and the ground from movement data alone, potentially reducing the need for specialised force-measuring plates embedded in the laboratory floor.

The findings demonstrate the potential of these technologies while highlighting the trade-offs between measurement accuracy, ease of use, and real-time performance. Overall, this thesis contributes towards making objective movement analysis more accessible beyond specialised laboratories.

Congratulations to Simon on this achievemment!

Near-field 3D SAR imaging with no constraints on motion using physics-informed deep learning

Simon’s research focuses on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), a technique that exploits motion to achieve high-resolution radar imaging without requiring large antenna arrays. However, traditional SAR methods rely on restrictive motion assumptions that limit their use in emerging applications such as autonomous navigation and drone-based sensing. Simon will address this gap by developing a physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for 3D imaging under arbitrary motion, which will be validated through real-world drone-based radar experiments.

Make appointment

Find out when each doctor is available in the online agenda (MYA). 

Regular patients log in with their MYA-account. If you don’t have one yet, you can create one and it will have to be approved by one of the doctors. If you are already registered at the practice, your MYA-account will be automatically approved.

Or copy paste this link into your browser: https://shorturl.at/bdrBF

VUB students and staff can log in with their VUB account.

Or copy paste this link into your browser: https://shorturl.at/mosE8

Cancel appointment

You can cancel it yourself in the online calendar, up until 24 hours before your appointment. Want to cancel on the same day? Please contact us via phone.

Appointment on the same day

are available from 8:00AM

Appointments for the next day

become available 15 hours ahead of time

Price

A consultation costs €33.5

Rates

The University Group Practice charges subsidised rates: all consultations between 8:00AM and 6:00PM are charged at the subsidised rate of € 33 for 10 minutes. If further examinations are necessary, there may be a surcharge. 

• Those affiliated to a Belgian national insurance scheme (“mututaliteit”) pay the patient contribution of maximum € 6. The remaining amount is covered by the legitimate reimbursement from the R.I.Z.I.V.
• Individuals without Belgian national insurance scheme pay the full amount and receive a certificate of the care provided. They themselves verify with their health insurance company whether they can reclaim the amount paid.

Payments:

• Bancontact: Dr. Desmet
• Payconiq or QR code: Dr. Foukoua and Dr. Hatam
• Cash: all doctors

Care offer

• Illness, treatment of wounds and assistance for a range of medical issues
• Blood sampling and analysis
• Minor surgery
• Birth control and STD screening
• Travel medicine and vaccinations
• Sports medicine and certificates
• Preventive cervical, breast and colorectal cancer screening
• Monitoring of pregnancies, babies and children
• Monitoring of chronic conditions
• Repeat prescriptions
• Guidance to quit smoking
• End-of-life counselling

From 3 November 2026, you will submit your expense claims through FOX Expenses, using SAP Concur. This means we will say goodbye to RACSWEB as the system for submitting and processing staff expenses. FOX Expenses makes it easier to submit, track and approve your expense claims. In this article, you can find out what is changing, why we are making this switch and what you need to know to get started smoothly.

https://vub.sharepoint.com/sites/PUB_DF/SitePages/Submit-your-expenses-via-FOX-from-3-November.aspx

What is changing?

As mentioned above, from 3 November FOX Expenses will make managing your expense claims easier.

• Submit expenses from your computer or smartphone. Simply take a photo of your receipt or supporting document. FOX Expenses automatically recognises the key information, so you have less to enter manually.
• Claim allowances, such as mileage or daily allowances.
• Allocate your expense claim to the correct budget.
• Automatically send your expense claim to the correct approver, in line with the four-eyes principle.
• Track the status of your expense claim. You can see at any time where your claim is in the process and who still needs to approve it.
• Process credit card transactions by adding the required supporting documents.
• Manage expenses on the go using the mobile app.

Why are we updating the process?

The move from RACSWEB to FOX Expenses is part of a broader transformation programme through which VUB is gradually modernising its financial processes and support.

The overarching FOX programme is the backbone of this transformation. With FOX, we are moving towards a more modern and integrated way of working, supported by digital technology and artificial intelligence. This will make our financial processes more efficient, support the university’s continued growth and make financial information available more quickly and easily.

For expense claims, this means:

• Faster – Less manual work and shorter waiting times for reimbursement.
• In line with VUB rules – Your expense claims are processed in accordance with VUB’s expense policy.
• Clearer – You can follow the approval process and see at any time where your expense claim stands and who still needs to approve it. Budget holders also have a clear overview.
• Available anywhere – You can also submit expenses through the mobile app. For example, you can take a photo of your receipt immediately after making a purchase instead of having to keep it until later.

Would you like to delegate the submission or approval of an expense claim? A separate application is available for this. More information about delegations and how to set them up will be included in the instructions available when FOX Expenses launches.

Which system powers FOX Expenses?

FOX Expenses uses SAP Concur Expense. You will therefore still see the SAP Concur or Concur name and logo in the application, mobile app and automated emails. This is perfectly normal: SAP Concur is the application VUB uses within FOX to process expense claims.

How will the transition work?

To ensure a smooth transition from RACSWEB to FOX Expenses, there will be a short period during which you will temporarily be unable to submit new expense claims.

• Up to and including 30 October – You can still submit your expenses through RACSWEB.
• From 31 October up to and including 2 November – During this period, you will temporarily be unable to submit new expense claims through either RACSWEB or FOX Expenses.
• From 3 November onwards – Submit your expense claims through FOX Expenses.

What will still be handled through RACSWEB?

RACSWEB will not disappear completely. After 3 November, reimbursements to third parties and the creation of purchase orders will continue to be handled through RACSWEB.

Help with the transition

We are providing several forms of support to help you get started with FOX Expenses.

Shortly before launch, you will find instructional videos on SharePoint covering the different topics. These will show you step by step how to submit and track your expenses through FOX Expenses. A user guide will also be available.

Still have questions after watching the instructional videos and reading the user guide? Email foxconcur@vub.be. The Finance Department will deal with your question as quickly as possible.

Manuel Montoya obtained a 4-year FWO scholarship for his PhD research: Efficient algorithms for Partially Coherent Light Propagation in Computer Generated Holography. His promoter is David Blinder.

Prof. Nikos Deligiannis (VUB-ETRO) and Prof. Jean-François Argacha (UZ Brussel-CHVZ) presented VUB’s activities and outcomes within Work Package 3 of the Horizon ENACT project at AIOTI Days 2026, taking place in Florence on 28–29 September 2026.

Prof. Deligiannis gave a talk entitled “AI Models for Population-Based Exposome-Driven Hospitalisation Risk Prediction in ENACT,” highlighting the use of AI models to assess exposome-related hospitalisation risks (attached poster).

Prof. Argacha presented “Assessing Exposome-related Risk of Non-Communicable Diseases in ENACT: From Myocardial Infarction to the Next Steps,” focusing on the assessment of exposome-related risks for non-communicable diseases and future research directions within ENACT.

More information about AIOTI Days 2026 is available at https://aioti.eu/aioti-days-2026/.

More information about the ENACT project is available at https://enact-he.eu/

Gisteren hebben we tijdens een zonovergoten avond het ecosysteem van Green Energy Park vzw en FACT – VUB samengebracht voor een interessant netwerkevent.

Een inspirerende uitleg over onze ambities, de visie van Siemens over het belang van intense samenwerking, overtuigende pitches van de onderzoeksgroepen van FACT – VUB, een infosessie over het Interreg-project EMR H2-HUBs, verschillende demo’s … een mooi programma waar iedereen zijn gading in kon vinden.

De avond werd afgesloten onder een stralende zon waardoor het netwerken net dat tikkeltje aangenamer was.

Bedankt aan onze sprekers Inne Peersman, Siperius Yves, Maarten Messagie, Cedric De Cauwer, Gabriela Barrera, Md Sazzad Hosen, Christof Devriendt, Aurélie Bellemans, Lukas Berger, Tom Van Assche, Johan Stiens, Hubert Rahier en onze demostandhouders Priva, Fluvius, Allspark, Flux50, ABB, EVERGi, ETRO VUB, Physical Chemistry and Polymer Science en VUB Architectural Engineering.

“Signal Processing in the AI era” was the tagline of this year’s IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, taking place in Rhodes, Greece.

In this context, Brent de Weerdt, Xiangyu Yang, Boris Joukovsky, Alex Stergiou and Nikos Deligiannis presented ETRO’s research during poster sessions and oral presentations, with novel ways to process and understand graph, video, and audio data. Nikos Deligiannis chaired a session on Graph Deep Learning, attended the IEEE T-IP Editorial Board Meeting, and had the opportunity to meet with collaborators from the VUB-Duke-Ugent-UCL joint lab.

Featured articles:

• De Weerdt, B. et al., “Designing Transformer Networks for Sparse Recovery of Sequential Data Using Deep Unfolding” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10094712)
• Yang X. et al., “Relevance Propagation through Deep Conditional Random Fields” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10095075)
• Stergiou A. et al., “Play it back: Iterative attention for audio recognition” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10096532, developed at the University of Bristol)

On 26 October 2026 at 16:00, Alican Çağlar will defend their PhD entitled “LOW-POWER CRYOGENIC CMOS INTERFACES FOR SCALABLE QUANTUM COMPUTERS”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room D.2.01 or online via this link.

Realizing a fault-tolerant quantum computer based on superconducting or spin quantum bits (qubits) requires millions of physical qubits operating below 100 mK in dilution refrigerators. In the early years of quantum processor research and development, qubits were controlled using room temperature electronics due to their small scale. However, with the rapid increase in the number of qubits in the last decade, the massive amount of cabling required between mK temperatures and room temperature has become a bottleneck. To overcome this limitation, CMOS electronics, the technology underlying modern microprocessors, are increasingly used in close proximity to qubits at cryogenic temperatures, such as the mK and 4 K stages of dilution refrigerators. These circuits are commonly referred to as cryogenic CMOS (cryo-CMOS). The main challenge for scalable cryo-CMOS control electronics is the very low power budget in dilution refrigerators, due to their limited cooling power.

In the first phase of this research, a system-on-chip (SoC) for qubit readout at 4 K was developed using 28 nm bulk CMOS technology. The SoC employs a full zero intermediate frequency architecture and operates in the 6-8 GHz frequency range at 4 K. The readout SoC achieves lower power consumption with a noise performance comparable to prior works.

In the second phase, CMOS circuits operating at mK temperatures were investigated. In this context, two prototypes, a DC demultiplexer and a charge-redistribution DC digital-to-analog converter (DAC) implemented in 65 nm bulk CMOS technology, have been designed to alleviate the DC wiring bottleneck for spin qubit biasing. Thanks to their low power consumption, they enable the biasing of over 100,000 qubits at 100 mK.

Help ons het onderzoek naar beter lopen vooruit te helpen

Loop je zo?

Neem dan contact met ons op via ✉️elena.botti@vub.be

Twijfel je nog? Je hoeft geen zelfdiagnose te stellen, laten we samen een videogesprek inplannen! Stuur ons een e-mail naar elena.botti@vub.be en wij kijken of je in aanmerking komt.

Wat u kunt verwachten

We willen loopanalyse eenvoudiger en toegankelijker maken. We vergelijken een kleine draagbare bewegingssensor (IMU) met een motion-capture-systeem voor laboratoriumgebruik (Vicon) om de methoden voor het analyseren van verschillende looppatronen te verbeteren. Op de onderstaande foto’s ziet u de opstelling: de IMU is de kleine sensor op de onderrug van de patiënt en voor Vicon moeten er kleine markeringen op uw lichaam worden aangebracht.

Samenvatting

📍Eén bezoek aan het Brubotics Rehabilitation Research Center (BRRC) – Laarbeeklaan 121, 1090 Jette, Brussel

⏱️Ongeveer 2 uur vanaf het moment dat je binnenkomt tot het einde van de opnamesessie

🎽Draag een sportbroekje of ondergoed, zodat we de markeringen kunnen aanbrengen. Je loopt op blote voeten

🏁 15 wandelingen van 10 meter: 5 langzaam, 5 normaal en 5 snel, in je eigen tempo

✔️Klaar! Voor je het weet ben je klaar, geen behandeling en geen vervolgafspraak. Je hebt bijgedragen aan het onderzoek!🔬

Contactgegevens

Doctoraatsstudent Elena Botti

elena.botti@vub.be

Dr. Redona Brahimetaj

redona.brahimetaj@vub.be

Prof. Bart Jansen

bart.jansen@vub.be

Directeur Prof. Eva Swinnen

eva.swinnen@vub.be

Aidez-nous à faire avancer la recherche pour une meilleure marche

Vous marchez comme ça?

Alors contactez-nous à l’adresse ✉️elena.botti@vub.be

Pas sûr(e)? Inutile de vous diagnostiquer vous-même, organisons un appel vidéo ensemble! Envoyez-nous un e-mail à l’adresse elena.botti@vub.be et nous vérifierons si vous êtes éligible.

À quoi s’attendre

Nous souhaitons rendre l’analyse de la marche plus simple et plus accessible. Nous comparons un petit capteur de mouvement portable (IMU) à un système de capture de mouvement de laboratoire (Vicon) afin d’améliorer les méthodes d’analyse des différents types de marche. Le dispositif est visible sur les photos ci-dessous : l’IMU est le petit capteur placé dans le bas du dos du patient, tandis que le système Vicon nécessite la pose de petits marqueurs sur votre corps.

En bref

📍Une seule visite au Brubotics Rehabilitation Research Center (BRRC) – Avenue du Laerbeek 121, 1090 Jette, Bruxelles

⏱️Environ 2 heures, depuis votre arrivée jusqu’à la fin de la séance d’enregistrement

🎽Portez un short de sport ou des sous-vêtements afin que nous puissions placer les marqueurs. Vous marcherez pieds nus

🏁 15 allers-retours de 10 mètres : 5 lents, 5 normaux et 5 rapides, à votre rythme

✔️C’est terminé ! Vous aurez fini avant même de vous en rendre compte, sans traitement ni suivi. Vous aurez contribué à la recherche !🔬

Coordonnées

Doctorante Elena Botti

elena.botti@vub.be

Dr. Redona Brahimetaj

redona.brahimetaj@vub.be

Prof. Bart Jansen

bart.jansen@vub.be

Directrice Prof. Eva Swinnen

eva.swinnen@vub.be

On 23 October 2026 at 16:00, Brent De Weerdt will defend their PhD entitled “Interpretable Transformer Networks for Compressed Sensing, Representation Learning, and Distributed Source Coding”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room LIC.0.04 or online via this link.

The current trend in artificial intelligence, and deep learning in particular, is to design increasingly large and complex models. Although these models achieve high accuracy, they require large datasets, high computational budgets, and often remain difficult to interpret. This thesis addresses these limitations by leveraging theoretical knowledge and data priors to design lightweight, performant, and inherently interpretable Transformer-based deep learning models.

The work first considers signal acquisition through compressed sensing. Using deep unfolding, the thesis designs neural networks for signal reconstruction from compressed measurements. By incorporating sparsity and temporal correlation, it develops interpretable Transformer models that reconstruct signals more accurately and efficiently than existing methods. The thesis then studies compact and privacy-preserving representations of human pose trajectories in video using contrastive learning and generative modelling, enabling anomaly detection through deviations from learned normal motion patterns. Finally, the thesis addresses distributed source coding, where correlated observations from multiple devices can be compressed more efficiently by exploiting inter-source dependencies. Building on LDPCA codes, it proposes a multi-rate Transformer decoder for Slepian-Wolf decoding that outperforms traditional decoders and reduces communication cost compared with alternative distributed compression methods.

Overall, the thesis develops deep learning architectures that incorporate signal processing, information theory, and data-specific prior knowledge, achieving state-of-the-art performance across several tasks while reducing the computational budget by at least an order of magnitude in most cases.

The planner you wish you had when facing a project deadline!

Nothing special. Anyone could make one — if only they had the time!

Need a quick project timeline without struggling with complicated planning software?

This simple Excel sheet lets you create and update project roadmaps on the fly. Just enter your tasks, dates and milestones, and the chart builds itself. Change something, and it updates automatically.

A few innocent VBA macros do the work behind the scenes. No installation, no complicated setup.

Download it, enable macros and start planning. Instructions are included in the Excel file.

Download Excel Gantt Planner

On 30 October 2026 at 16:00, Silvia Zaccardi will defend their PhD entitled “Beyond the lab: Towards portable clinical motion analysis with observer-worn head-mounted displays”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room LIC.0.04 or online via this link.

Human movement analysis provides valuable information for assessing patients and monitoring rehabilitation. However, accurate measurements typically require expensive equipment in specialised laboratories, limiting their use in everyday clinical practice.

This thesis explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Mixed Reality (MR) headsets could make movement analysis more affordable, portable, and accessible. The long-term vision is a system in which a physiotherapist wears an MR headset while a patient walks or performs exercises in front of them. Cameras built into the headset would track the patient’s movements, while relevant information, such as joint angles and walking characteristics, would be displayed directly in the physiotherapist’s field of view, supporting clinical assessment in real time.

Towards this vision, the research proposes two approaches to capturing human movement using the headset’s built-in cameras and sensors. The first uses AI to estimate body movement directly from video, without requiring physical markers, while the second uses small reflective markers attached to the patient’s body to improve tracking accuracy. The thesis also explores AI algorithms to estimate the forces between the feet and the ground from movement data alone, potentially reducing the need for specialised force-measuring plates embedded in the laboratory floor.

The findings demonstrate the potential of these technologies while highlighting the trade-offs between measurement accuracy, ease of use, and real-time performance. Overall, this thesis contributes towards making objective movement analysis more accessible beyond specialised laboratories.

Congratulations to Simon on this achievemment!

Near-field 3D SAR imaging with no constraints on motion using physics-informed deep learning

Simon’s research focuses on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), a technique that exploits motion to achieve high-resolution radar imaging without requiring large antenna arrays. However, traditional SAR methods rely on restrictive motion assumptions that limit their use in emerging applications such as autonomous navigation and drone-based sensing. Simon will address this gap by developing a physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for 3D imaging under arbitrary motion, which will be validated through real-world drone-based radar experiments.

Make appointment

Find out when each doctor is available in the online agenda (MYA). 

Regular patients log in with their MYA-account. If you don’t have one yet, you can create one and it will have to be approved by one of the doctors. If you are already registered at the practice, your MYA-account will be automatically approved.

Or copy paste this link into your browser: https://shorturl.at/bdrBF

VUB students and staff can log in with their VUB account.

Or copy paste this link into your browser: https://shorturl.at/mosE8

Cancel appointment

You can cancel it yourself in the online calendar, up until 24 hours before your appointment. Want to cancel on the same day? Please contact us via phone.

Appointment on the same day

are available from 8:00AM

Appointments for the next day

become available 15 hours ahead of time

Price

A consultation costs €33.5

Rates

The University Group Practice charges subsidised rates: all consultations between 8:00AM and 6:00PM are charged at the subsidised rate of € 33 for 10 minutes. If further examinations are necessary, there may be a surcharge. 

• Those affiliated to a Belgian national insurance scheme (“mututaliteit”) pay the patient contribution of maximum € 6. The remaining amount is covered by the legitimate reimbursement from the R.I.Z.I.V.
• Individuals without Belgian national insurance scheme pay the full amount and receive a certificate of the care provided. They themselves verify with their health insurance company whether they can reclaim the amount paid.

Payments:

• Bancontact: Dr. Desmet
• Payconiq or QR code: Dr. Foukoua and Dr. Hatam
• Cash: all doctors

Care offer

• Illness, treatment of wounds and assistance for a range of medical issues
• Blood sampling and analysis
• Minor surgery
• Birth control and STD screening
• Travel medicine and vaccinations
• Sports medicine and certificates
• Preventive cervical, breast and colorectal cancer screening
• Monitoring of pregnancies, babies and children
• Monitoring of chronic conditions
• Repeat prescriptions
• Guidance to quit smoking
• End-of-life counselling

From 3 November 2026, you will submit your expense claims through FOX Expenses, using SAP Concur. This means we will say goodbye to RACSWEB as the system for submitting and processing staff expenses. FOX Expenses makes it easier to submit, track and approve your expense claims. In this article, you can find out what is changing, why we are making this switch and what you need to know to get started smoothly.

https://vub.sharepoint.com/sites/PUB_DF/SitePages/Submit-your-expenses-via-FOX-from-3-November.aspx

What is changing?

As mentioned above, from 3 November FOX Expenses will make managing your expense claims easier.

• Submit expenses from your computer or smartphone. Simply take a photo of your receipt or supporting document. FOX Expenses automatically recognises the key information, so you have less to enter manually.
• Claim allowances, such as mileage or daily allowances.
• Allocate your expense claim to the correct budget.
• Automatically send your expense claim to the correct approver, in line with the four-eyes principle.
• Track the status of your expense claim. You can see at any time where your claim is in the process and who still needs to approve it.
• Process credit card transactions by adding the required supporting documents.
• Manage expenses on the go using the mobile app.

Why are we updating the process?

The move from RACSWEB to FOX Expenses is part of a broader transformation programme through which VUB is gradually modernising its financial processes and support.

The overarching FOX programme is the backbone of this transformation. With FOX, we are moving towards a more modern and integrated way of working, supported by digital technology and artificial intelligence. This will make our financial processes more efficient, support the university’s continued growth and make financial information available more quickly and easily.

For expense claims, this means:

• Faster – Less manual work and shorter waiting times for reimbursement.
• In line with VUB rules – Your expense claims are processed in accordance with VUB’s expense policy.
• Clearer – You can follow the approval process and see at any time where your expense claim stands and who still needs to approve it. Budget holders also have a clear overview.
• Available anywhere – You can also submit expenses through the mobile app. For example, you can take a photo of your receipt immediately after making a purchase instead of having to keep it until later.

Would you like to delegate the submission or approval of an expense claim? A separate application is available for this. More information about delegations and how to set them up will be included in the instructions available when FOX Expenses launches.

Which system powers FOX Expenses?

FOX Expenses uses SAP Concur Expense. You will therefore still see the SAP Concur or Concur name and logo in the application, mobile app and automated emails. This is perfectly normal: SAP Concur is the application VUB uses within FOX to process expense claims.

How will the transition work?

To ensure a smooth transition from RACSWEB to FOX Expenses, there will be a short period during which you will temporarily be unable to submit new expense claims.

• Up to and including 30 October – You can still submit your expenses through RACSWEB.
• From 31 October up to and including 2 November – During this period, you will temporarily be unable to submit new expense claims through either RACSWEB or FOX Expenses.
• From 3 November onwards – Submit your expense claims through FOX Expenses.

What will still be handled through RACSWEB?

RACSWEB will not disappear completely. After 3 November, reimbursements to third parties and the creation of purchase orders will continue to be handled through RACSWEB.

Help with the transition

We are providing several forms of support to help you get started with FOX Expenses.

Shortly before launch, you will find instructional videos on SharePoint covering the different topics. These will show you step by step how to submit and track your expenses through FOX Expenses. A user guide will also be available.

Still have questions after watching the instructional videos and reading the user guide? Email foxconcur@vub.be. The Finance Department will deal with your question as quickly as possible.

Manuel Montoya obtained a 4-year FWO scholarship for his PhD research: Efficient algorithms for Partially Coherent Light Propagation in Computer Generated Holography. His promoter is David Blinder.

Prof. Nikos Deligiannis (VUB-ETRO) and Prof. Jean-François Argacha (UZ Brussel-CHVZ) presented VUB’s activities and outcomes within Work Package 3 of the Horizon ENACT project at AIOTI Days 2026, taking place in Florence on 28–29 September 2026.

Prof. Deligiannis gave a talk entitled “AI Models for Population-Based Exposome-Driven Hospitalisation Risk Prediction in ENACT,” highlighting the use of AI models to assess exposome-related hospitalisation risks (attached poster).

Prof. Argacha presented “Assessing Exposome-related Risk of Non-Communicable Diseases in ENACT: From Myocardial Infarction to the Next Steps,” focusing on the assessment of exposome-related risks for non-communicable diseases and future research directions within ENACT.

More information about AIOTI Days 2026 is available at https://aioti.eu/aioti-days-2026/.

More information about the ENACT project is available at https://enact-he.eu/

Gisteren hebben we tijdens een zonovergoten avond het ecosysteem van Green Energy Park vzw en FACT – VUB samengebracht voor een interessant netwerkevent.

Een inspirerende uitleg over onze ambities, de visie van Siemens over het belang van intense samenwerking, overtuigende pitches van de onderzoeksgroepen van FACT – VUB, een infosessie over het Interreg-project EMR H2-HUBs, verschillende demo’s … een mooi programma waar iedereen zijn gading in kon vinden.

De avond werd afgesloten onder een stralende zon waardoor het netwerken net dat tikkeltje aangenamer was.

Bedankt aan onze sprekers Inne Peersman, Siperius Yves, Maarten Messagie, Cedric De Cauwer, Gabriela Barrera, Md Sazzad Hosen, Christof Devriendt, Aurélie Bellemans, Lukas Berger, Tom Van Assche, Johan Stiens, Hubert Rahier en onze demostandhouders Priva, Fluvius, Allspark, Flux50, ABB, EVERGi, ETRO VUB, Physical Chemistry and Polymer Science en VUB Architectural Engineering.