“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)
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
- Structured collaboration with IMEC on semiconductor Technology. The PhD of Hugo Thienpont (ALNA, now B-Phot) on optical bistability is based on fully VUB-owned technology.
- PRIMIS: Workgroup on AI in Diagnostic Imaging – A structured and funded research platform UZ Brussel and several engineering groups in the hospital.
On September 22nd 2025 at 16:00, Thibaut Vandervelden will defend their PhD entitled “RUST-BASED IOT NETWORKS: A NETWORK PROTOCOL AND SECURITY PERSPECTIVE”.
Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room I.2.01 or online via this link.
The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to transform our interconnected world. Its rapid growth raises significant concerns about privacy and security. In recent years, numerous IoT botnets have exploited vulnerabilities in embedded devices to launch large-scale Distributed Denial of Service attacks. These attacks have caused significant disruption to internet services worldwide.
Many of these security vulnerabilities come from the use of memory-unsafe programming languages, such as C and C++. Programming languages with built-in safety features can mitigate these vulnerabilities. Since its first stable release in 2015, Rust has emerged as a popular choice for system programming, gaining popularity due to its unique combination of memory safety guarantees while keeping its performance comparable to the one obtained with traditional programming languages. Developers have successfully deployed Rust across diverse domains, including Operating Systems (OSs), web services, and embedded devices.
For IoT devices, two software components are particularly important: the OS and the network stack enabling communication. We provide an evaluation of OSs and frameworks for embedded devices available in Rust and examine their suitability for various IoT applications. We also investigate the feasibility and advantages of implementing a complete network stack in Rust for resource-constrained embedded devices. We built on the smoltcp library and extended it with a Rust implementation of IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). We studied and implemented the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). We developed and applied an evaluation methodology to check compliance with the standard and to verify interoperability with existing implementations. Doing so, we solved several issues of the current RPL implementation in ContikiNG. Our research also evaluates the effectiveness of 6LoWPAN generic header compression for use in RPL networks. The results demonstrate that this compression format significantly reduces energy consumption for IEEE 802.15.4-based networks that offer low data rates. For higher data rates, the benefit of this compression format diminishes.
Alongside contributing to networking components in Rust, we also explored security primitives. We evaluated the performance of different Keccak sponge constructions, cryptographic primitives that can serve as building blocks for various security protocols. Our findings reveal that Keccak sponge constructions with lower capacity parameters achieve significantly better efficiency on 32-bit microcontrollers commonly used in IoT devices. Building on these insights, we design and implement two novel symmetric-key-based authentication protocols. One tailored for wireless sensor networks and the other for fog based networks. We demonstrate that our protocol provides robust protection against known attacks while maintaining low computational and communication overhead.
Johan Stiens gave an interview with deputy of the province Flemish-Brabant on Ring TV about the TRN radar in support for renovation in the construction industry
Subsidies van 600.000 euro voor innoverende bedrijven in Vlaams-Brabant | Ring (ringtv.be)
600.000 euro voor innoverende Vlaams-Brabantse bedrijven | Voka
On March 6th 2024 at 16::00, Thomas Lapauw will defend their PhD entitled “TAUCAM: A HIGH-SPEED TIME-GATED CAMERA FOR FLUORESCENCE LIFETIME IMAGING”.
Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room D.2.01, or digitally via this link.
In the field of medical imaging, there is an ever-ongoing search for new ways to image tissue in less invasive ways to create more contrast and get more information about the biological processes that are happening. Fluorescence imaging has gained much interest due to its safety, low cost, and high sensitivity. This is especially the case in the field of preclinical research with small animals, where a lot of research is being done towards the development of targeted fluorescent contrast agents and the clinical translation thereof.
Fluorescence intensity imaging depends on many variables: concentration, absorption, scattering, illumination power, … By using the inherent temporal behavior of the fluorophores, the lifetime, some of these issues can be mitigated, and additional information can be gained. This fluorescent emission is very faint and happens within a few hundred picoseconds to a few nanoseconds after excitation, this timescale makes measuring lifetime challenging.
This work presents the development of the tauCAM, a widefield highspeed time-gated camera, intended for widefield fluorescence-lifetime imaging in the NIR-I band. The tauCAM uses a watercooled 64×64 pixel CAPS array based on our proprietary Current-Assisted Photonic Sampler (CAPS) pixel. The hardware development, (embedded) software, and the related engineering choices are covered in detail, in addition to the characterization of different performance aspects of the tauCAM.
The realization of this camera and software framework around it enables a whole slew of new applications and research opportunities aside from fluorescence lifetime imaging, ranging from timeresolved spectroscopy and time-domain multiplexed RGB; to the development of targeted fluorescent dyes and studying lifetime modulation in relation to binding status and environment.
𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐎𝐍 🕺with TWO ETRO participants!
🤙 Detailed description: https://lnkd.in/egx7zM4X
𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐎𝐍 with Ioana-Teodora Ouatu & Johan Stiens
𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐂 with Taylor Frantz
⚡️hub.brussels supports hashtag#entrepreneurs who make an hashtag#impact
