Exciting news for the start of this academic year in the team of Prof. Nikos Deligiannis: a prestigious FWO grant has been awarded to 2nd year PhD candidate Brent de Weerdt. Brent will start a new research project with a goal in mind: merging optimization algorithms and deep learning algorithms, to create more efficient models for image, video processing and computer vision. Additionally, PhD candidates Esther Rodrigo and Boris Joukovsky successfully passed the 2 years evaluation mark for their FWO grants. Their respective research on explainable graph deep learning on video deep learning have been consequently extended.