“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)
Today the results of Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen Mandaten aspirant strategisch basisonderzoek were announced. 196 Mandates were awarded, 13 for VUB and TWO for ETRO. Very well done, Cedric Baijot (prom. Maarten Kuijk) and Salar Tayebi (Prom. Johan Stiens)! Also Delphine Van Laethem, who is doing a PhD with Jeroen Van Schependom will get the scholarship.
We are pleased to share that colleague Hamza Mekhzoum recently secured the first prize at the MARSS23 hackathon, hosted by Universitätsklinik Balgrist in Zurich, Switzerland. More details can be found here.
On the left side of the picture is Professor Nassir Navab, a distinguished figure in computer science at Technische Universität München, and a pioneer in Augmented Reality and AI: Google scholar link.
In the middle is Hamza Mekhzoum
To the right is Matthias Seibold, a researcher specializing in Orthopedic Computer Science at Balgrist University Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland. Google Scholar link.
Tripat Kaur followed the Masters in Applied Computer Science in 2020. His interest in Computer Science goes back to his school days. Not only the theory classes were very interesting, he also enjoyed the practical assignments to the fullest. His first-ever programming language C++. was a thrill. He made his first program on the blue screen of Turbo to get a ‘Hello Tripat’ output on the black screen. Ever since programming has been his passion.
The MACS program started teaching from a very basic level. Even if one had no computer science background, it was not a problem because everything is taught from scratch, but the study load in the first year was very high. Tripat enjoyed Advanced Programming Concepts the most by far. It helped him improve his programming skills a lot. Tripat studied during the corona year and his first year was through remote teaching. It was very different from what he had imagined. Even though being in different countries, his fellow students made sure that he did not have to worry about the time differences. They always adjusted with him making it fun to work on team projects. Tripat is now a more confident person as his horizons have widened. Not only technically but even his soft skills have improved thanks to this program. Tripat says: Never be afraid to dream. Word hard and believe in yourself, things will fall into place. His ideal future is to be completely independent and settled not only in terms of finances but in terms of happiness and confidence. Also, being able to support his family the way they have till now.
Brea Mafazine (Brussels Engineering Alumni) Featured an article on the ETRO department touching on our history and current activities
You can find the article here.
Benyameen Keelson and Pieter Boonen sucessfully finished the LifeTech.brussels MedTech accelerator with their startup projects PADFLOW en KARMA.
Some extra infomation can be found here.
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lifetech-brussels_medtechaccelerator-juryprize-publicprize-activity-7250177652748169216-x5-_?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
- https://lifetech.brussels/en/medtech-accelerator/
- https://lifetech.brussels/en/innovation-in-progress/
The introductory movies for the projects:
Benyameen:
Pieter:
De Vrije Universiteit Brussel wil met een supercomputer rampen zoals de waterbom in WalloniĂ« van 4 jaar geleden, beter kunnen voorspellen. De nieuwe supercomputer kan met AI de informatie die radars en satellieten leveren sneller verwerken en zo sneller updates geven over de weersomstandigheden.Â
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2025/11/30/supercomputer-rampen-waterbom