Johan Stiens gave a lecture @ the atheneum Geel in the framework of PACT

“Technology, Humanity, and the Climate Imperative: Engineering a Sustainable Future”

 Climate change is no longer a distant threat—it is a defining reality shaping our planet, economies, and societies. This keynote invites participants to take a bird’s-eye view of the interconnected forces driving this transformation and to explore how technology, data, and global citizenship can converge to create a sustainable future. We begin with critical observations on climate change and its cascading impact on population dynamics and economic resilience. From there, we examine the evolving energy mix, where renewable sources are not just alternatives but imperatives, demanding innovation in materials, transistors, and processors that power both ICT and solar technologies.

As we enter the data era, ICT systems and smart IoT solutions are unlocking unprecedented sectorial benefits—from MedTech and HealthTech to agri-food and construction—while enabling biodiversity and sustainability at scale. These advances are not merely technical; they represent a societal shift toward intelligent, resource-efficient ecosystems. Drawing on decades of experience in sensor technology development and active engagement with global organizations, this talk will challenge academia, industry, and policymakers to embrace technology uptake as a catalyst for systemic change. Ultimately, the question is not only how we innovate, but how we become true global citizens—responsible stewards of the planet we share, and architects of a future where digital intelligence and clean energy work hand in hand to safeguard life on Earth.

On September 17 2021 at 16.00 Jakub Ceranka will defend his PhD entitled “Advancements in Whole-Body Multi-Modal MRI: Towards Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Metastatic Bone Disease”.

Everybody is invited to attend the online presentation via  this teams link.

Cancer that begins in an organ, such as the lungs, breast or prostate, and then spreads to the bone or other organs, marks the beginning of metastatic disease. The confident detection of metastatic bone disease and the reliable assessment of the tumour load and treatment response is essential to improve patients’ quality of life and increase life expectancy. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been successfully used for monitoring of metastatic bone disease. Anatomical whole-body sequences offer excellent resolution and sensitivity for the detection of neoplastic cells within the bone marrow. In combination with spatially prealigned functional diffusion-weighted whole-body MRI and apparent diffusion coefficient maps, it allows for focused, efficient, multi-parametric and holistic evaluation of the total tumour volume, diffusion volume and treatment response assessment. One of the major challenges of radiological reading of whole-body MRI in the clinical routine comes from the large amount of data to be reviewed, making lesion detection and quantification demanding for a radiologist, but also prone to error. Additionally, whole-body MR images are often corrupted with multiple spatial and intensity artifacts, which degrade the performance of medical image processing algorithms.

This PhD thesis proposes number of contributions in the medical image processing domain aiming at improving the quality and extending the usability of whole-body multi-modal MRI in the clinical routine. These include spatial groupwise image registration (to align multiple MRI modalities), multi-atlas segmentation (to define the skeleton region of interest), image standardization (to map MRI intensities into comparable ranges) and a deep learning framework for detection and segmentation of metastatic bone disease, as it is pathology of choice for this work. Combined, proposed contributions provide building blocks for a fully automated computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for the detection and segmentation of metastatic bone disease using whole-body multi-modal MRI. Finally, an ablation study describing the impact of different CAD system components on detection and segmentation accuracy is provided.

Naar aanleiding van de heropening van het Sint-Janshospitaal museum (Museum Sint-Janshospitaal)   in Brugge op 16 december zijn de schilderijen van Hans Memling gedigitaliseerd. In dit complex process speelt Universum Digitalis, een spin-off van het Departement Elektronica en Informatica (ETRO) van de VUB, een cruciale rol. De spin-off, onder leiding van professor Frederik Temmermans, verwerkte in opdracht van Musea Brugge honderden hoge resolutie detailopnames die door het Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium (KIK-IRPA) met nauwgezette methodiek werden gecapteerd. Universum Digitalis stoomde giga-pixel beelden klaar voor gebruik op het web, maar ook voor verder onderzoek in allerlei toepassingen.

De werken zijn online beschikbaar in hoge resolutie (closertomemling.be), en laten bezoekers toe om de kleinste details van de meester vele malen uitvergroot te bewonderen. Begin 2024 volgen ook andere belichtingstechnieken zoals infrarood, streeflicht en x-stralen.

Dit is niet het eerste wapenfeit van Universum Digitalis. De spin-off spitst zich toe op ultra hoge resolutiebeeldverwerking bij digitalisering van het onschatbare kunstpatrimonium, maar ook de verwezenlijking van interfaces die dit soort beelden eenvoudig toegankelijk maakt voor zowel de kunstwetenschapper als de museumbezoeker. Ze bouwden toepassingen voor musea, culturele instellingen en anderen voor de digitale reproductie van schilderijen/kunst in extreem hoge resolutie: van webtoepassingen tot museumkiosken.  Voorbeelden zijn de werken van Bruegel (insidebruegel.net) en het oevre van Van Eyck (closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be), een project dat eerder bekroond werd met een Belgian E-Gov Award en European Heritage / Europa Nostra Award.

Contact:

Frederik Temmermans: : frederik.temmermans@vub.be  0479 49 94 26

Two guest lecturers of the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST) will be presenting their work On Friday 05/08 at 10 AM, in room K.4.52. You are all cordially invited to attend.

ANSA (Advanced Networks and Smart Applications) is the research group composed of 08 professors and researchers, and quite large number of master students, undergraduates, and several PhD students.

The research group has the main interest focusing at advanced communication technologies and their applications in various fields, e.g. smart city, intelligent transportation systems, smart agriculture, environment monitoring and management,…

Several current topics includes cloud computing, edge computing, SDN-based architecture for task scheduling in edge-cloud computing, Quality of Experience, Network Security, Virtual Reality, Internet of Things (Zigbee, LoRa, NB-IoT), IoV (cellular-based and DSRC-based V2X). 

Presenter: Prof. Thanh Nguyen, Dean of School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (SEEE) and a senior member of ANSA research group. He will give an introduction of the lab and interesting topics. 

Presenter: Prof. Nguyen Huu Thanh

School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Hanoi University of Science and Technology

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The project aims to provide an Internet of Things (IoT) based parking monitoring and management solution for city-owned parking fields on streets. The system will be an integral part of the Intelligent Transportation System, in which the technology of AI, big data, IoT will be applied to provide innovative services related to transportation and traffic management and enable the user to be better informed and make “smarter” use of transport.

After nearly 3 years of running the project, various outcomes have been achieved. They include the design and implementation of detector devices, smart IoT gateways supporting various communication interfaces (LoRa, 4G, Wifi, Ethernet). Other alternative solution includes cameras and a lightweigh algorithm to detect and quantify free parking lots. Several theoretical results in Vehicular Fog Computing topic, published in a Q1 journal paper, will be presented. 

Presenter: Dr. Phùng Kiều Hà

School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Hanoi University of Science and Technology

ETRO is the focus in an article on the website https://belgian-research.eu/

Since its establishment in 1971, the Department of Electronics and Informatics (ETRO) has embraced an interdisciplinary approach. Today, it is the largest department within the Faculty of Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, bringing together a critical mass of over 150 researchers from across the globe. The research group ETRO.RDI – where RDI stands for Research, Development, and Innovation – comprises approximately 160 collaborators, including many from outside the department.

https://belgian-research.eu/department-and-research-group-etro-rdi-vub-willingness-to-tackle-the-unknown/

“Imaging & Machine Vision Europe“‘s Abigail Williams speaks to scientists tracking marine plastic using satellite spectral imagery. For ETRO, Prof Jonathan C-W Chan was interviewed. Below you can find his remarks.

Professor Jonathan Chan, noted that the ideal sensor to detect marine plastic should possess more spectral measurement capabilities at SWIR wavelengths.

Chan is working on the Muss2 project, which is using spectral and spatial enhancement methods to generate simulated Earth orbit hyperspectral shortwave infrared images and data from the Copernicus Sentinel 2 satellite using spectral response function modelling.

Hyperspectral images taken from Earth orbit are not always available and their coverage is not as large as conventional missions, such as Landsat and Sentinel. To overcome these limitations, Chan said the Muss2 team will apply a sparse theory-based method to enhance multispectral images from the Sentinel 2 satellite. The expected results are what he described as synthetic Sentinel 2 hyperspectral images at a spatial resolution of 10m, with the same coverage as Sentinel 2 multispectral images.

‘So far, we have been able to generate such images based on Hyperion and Prisma spectral configurations, [and] quantitative assessments are promising,’ he said. ‘In addition, we apply a deep learning-based method for the spatial enhancement of Prisma images to assist in the detection of smaller objects.’

Chan added: ‘All the data inputs for the project are from open sources, including Sentinel 2, Hyperion and Prisma. The launch of Prisma in 2019 was a major milestone, and soon EnMap will be launched. These are full stretch hyperspectral images at 400-2,500nm with hundreds of spectral bands and represent the most powerful Earth orbit data source for environmental monitoring. The potential is not yet fully understood nor exploited, and scientific communities are just beginning to understand all the pre-processing protocols and data quality issues.’