Current projects

Finished projects are listed on the projects archive page.

European projects

3DSAFEGUARD: Global Situational Awareness in Rescue, Calamity and Inspection Operations
6G shine: design of short-range communication protocols that can meet the extreme bandwidth, latency and energy requirements emerging for 6G.
BE-QCI: The goal of BeQCI is to introduce, evaluate and develop quantum communication infrastructure (QCI) in Belgium. Our consortium unites theoretical, experimental and engineering expertise on quantum technology, bringing together different university research groups, research centers, governmental agencies and private companies. BeQCI is part of the European EuroQCI initiative and is co-funded by the EU through the Digital Europe program and the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (Belspo) through the Federal restart and transition plan.
Bolster: to design, develop and optimise a Beyond 5G (B5G) architecture for a private mobile standalone tactical network. The envisioned network will be able to be deployed in an automated and ad hoc manner by offering zero-touch commissioning, deployment, and configuration.
DroneXperience: The goal of this project is to offer people, who are struggling to find and/or keep a job due to the covid epidemic, the current economic and energy crisis and/or the transition that most sectors are going through, concrete and hands-on drone training that will help them become more competitive in the job market, secure their future and that of our economy. This will be accomplished within 5 sub-themes namely: precision agriculture, construction, offshore, construction and maintenance of drones, and data protection and processing.
EQUO: Sustainability of future network scenarios will have to face several techno-economic challenges, such as the transmission and processing of enormous and increasing quantity of data with ultra-low latencies, automation of management and control processes, the fulfilment of strict requirements of resilience, security, and privacy, optimisation of energy consumption, and so on. Quantum technologies are expected to address some of these challenges. The scope and vision of EQUO is to engineer, integrate and realise very high TRL QKD-based systems for integration and deployment in an operational telecom infrastructure, thus providing a fundamental tool to significantly increase the security of sensitive digital data in Europe.
Hexa-X-II: The Smart Network and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) 6G Flagship project Hexa-X-II leads the way to the end-to-end (E2E) system design (based on integrated and interacting technology enablers) and the enabling platform delivering novel services for the next generation (6G) of wireless networks.
Maregraph: Build a data architecture for cost-efficient, flexible and sustainable data sharing for a Marine Knowledge Graph. In this project is a collaboration between the Flemish Marine Institute (VLIZ), Digital Flanders and the Italian National Research Council (CNR).
Oasees: OASEES aims to create an open, decentralised, intelligent and programmable edge framework for swarm architectures and applications, leveraging the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) paradigm and integrating Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) processes for efficient decision making with a portable and privacy preserving ID federation system.
TrialsNet: to promote the experimentation of use cases for the use of the 6G network, demonstrating the potential for interconnection between the physical, digital and human world with connectivity and application services with additional performance compared to current 5G platforms and new scenarios for large-scale IoT applications.
EDIH-Digitalis: DIGITALIS is the European Digital Innovation Hub (EDIH) focusing on supporting the digital transformation of manufacturing companies.
EDIH-EBE: EDIH-EBE provides a one-stop hub offering various services to increase the digital knowledge, skills and experience of Flemish companies focusing on energy applications in the construction sector to give them a competitive advantage. IDLab offers the HomeLab, for testing and validating new applications in a realistic home environment.
EDIH-Flanders AI
Phormic: PHORMIC combines silicon photonics with MEMS and integrated lasers to realize large-scale programmable photonic chips.
VALAWAI: VALAWAI aims to develop value-aware AI systems; that is, AI systems that are able to understand and abide by a value system and explain its own behaviour or understand the behaviour of others in terms of a value system.
LOLIPOP: LOLIPOP is a photonic integration project based on the combination of lithium niobate on insulator and silicon-nitride technology. In this project IDLab is contributing custom high-speed drivers and low-noise transimpedance amplifiers for various applications (lidar, photonic neural networks and squeezed state detection)
Pattern: PATTERN aims to develop the world’s first PDK and ADK for microwave photonics at ultra-high frequencies above 100 GHz. It will introduce novel functionalities into PICs that currently do not exist, such as magneto-optic isolators and acousto-optic modulators (AOMs).
Sprinter: Sprinter develops hybrid photonic integrated circuits for fiber-optic, free-space optical and mmWave communication systems supporting time critical networking in industrial environments. In this project IDLab is contributing custom high-speed drivers and low-noise transimpedance amplifiers for 1060nm VCSEL-based transceivers, O-band EML-based transceivers and burst-mode operation in fast tunable transceivers.
euRobin: A European ecosystem of robots that share their data and knowledge and are able, based on their diversity, to jointly learn to perform the endless variety of tasks in human environments.
6G Start: to facilitate the preparation activities of the European SNS Initiative and to orchestrate, capture and promote the achievements of the new 6G SNS initiative and the ongoing 5G PPP by facilitating its activities in the inter-project working groups and maintaining the links to the NetworldEurope community and the 5G IA membership.
Onto-Deside: The Onto-DESIDE project supports acceleration of the digital and green transitions, automating the discovery and formation of new collaborations in the circular economy. Within Onto-DESIDE (Ontology-based Decentralized Sharing of Industry Data in the European Circular Economy), IDLab will enable the efficient sharing of data and making it understandable and usable by humans and machines via a secure decentralised data sharing platform using Solid technologies.
ReStartSMEs: ReStartSMEs supports the digital transformation of manufacturing companies and facilitates collaborations for the adoption of novel Industry 5.0 technology.
GreenMov: Definition of harmonized data models for green mobility and the development of advanced green mobility services, such as traffic monitoring, shared mobility and environmental impact.
BD4NRG: BD4NRG develops and demonstrates a big data architecture, data model and AI toolbox for the energy domain along 13 large-scale pilots. The IDLab-AI4E team researches transfer learning for demand response services.
Dedicat 6G: DEDICAT 6G (EU-funded project under the Horizon 2020 Programme) aims to develop a smart connectivity platform using artificial intelligence and blockchain techniques that will enable 6G networks to combine the existing communication infrastructure with novel distribution of intelligence (data, computation, and storage) at the edge to allow not only flexible, but also energy efficient realisation of the envisaged real-time experience.
BIGG: The BIGG project aims at demonstrating the application of big data technologies and data analytic techniques for the complete building life-cycle of more than 4000 buildings in 6 large-scale pilot testbeds.
Bright: The BRIGHT project aims at realizing a multi-timescale demand response strategy that works from a day-ahead scheduling up to real-time adaptive control and allows individual assets to simultaneously provide power balancing service, grid congestion management, and economic benefits to participating stakeholders.
Int5Gent: Int5Gent targets the integration of innovative data plane technology building blocks under a flexible 5G network resource, slice and application orchestration framework, providing a complete 5G system platform for the validation of advance 5G services and IoT solutions.
5G blueprint: 5G-Blueprint (EU-funded project under H2020-ICT-2018-20) aims to design and validate technical architecture and business and governance models for uninterrupted cross-border teleoperated transport based on 5G connectivity. The project’s outcome will be the blueprint for operational pan-European deployment of teleoperated transport solutions in the logistics sector and beyond.
Open Data Lakes (ODALA): An initiative that aims to promote the use of Big Data to facilitate and speed up decision-making in public administrations and to improve data management and sharing between cities and regions.
TwinECS: The EU-funded TWINECS project aims to develop an efficient, robust, and accurate model to simulate electrical environmental control systems (e-ECS).
HandheldOCT: HandheldOCT is miniaturizing Optical Coherence Tomography using 1060nm Photonic Integrated Circuits for eye care. In this project IDLab is contributing custom high-sensitivity transimpedance amplifiers for balanced photodetectors on imec’s silicon nitride photonics platform.
Nebula: NEBULA (Neuro-augmented 112Gbaud CMOS plasmonic transceiver platform for Intra- and Inter-DCI applications) is a 3-year collaborative project on the development of a neuro-augmented 112Gbaud CMOS plasmonic transceiver platform for Intra- and Inter- DCI applications that brings together twelve leading academic and research institutes and companies. NEBULA aims to provide the foundations for a common future-proof transceiver technology platform with ultra-high bandwidth capabilities offered by a CMOS compatible toolkit and tailored towards meeting performance, cost and energy metrics in both inter-DCI coherent and intra-DCI ASIC co-packaged optics. NEBULA will be investing in the established bandwidth- and energy saving credentials of plasmonic modulator solutions together with the functional digital processing portfolio of neuromorphic optical reservoir computing engines towards painting the landscape of the next-coming disruption in transceiver evolution, tailoring them in System-in-Package prototype assemblies that can intersect with the challenging framework of both inter- and intra-DCI segments. The project was launched in January 2020 and it is funded by the European Commission through HORIZON 2020 framework targeting the topic ICT-05-2019: Application driven Photonics components.
Plasmoniac: PlasmoniAC (Energy- and Size-efficient Ultra-fast Plasmonic Circuits for Neuromorphic Computing Architectures) is a 3-year long H2020 research project aiming to release a whole new class of energy- and size-efficient feed-forward and recurrent artificial plasmonic neurons with up to 100 GHz clock frequencies and 1 and 6 orders of magnitude better energy- and footprint-efficiencies, comparing to the current electronics-based state-of-the art. It adopts the best-in-class material and technology platforms for optimizing computational power, size and energy at every of its constituent functions, harnessing the proven high-bandwidth and low-loss credentials of photonic interconnects together with the nm-size memory function of memristor nanoelectronics, bridging them by introducing plasmonics as the ideal technology for offering photonic-level bandwidths and electronic-level footprint computations within ultra-low energy consumption envelopes. In a holistic hardware/software co-design approach, PlasmoniAC will follow the path from technology development to addressing real application needs by developing a new set of DL training models and algorithms and embedding its new technology into ready-to-use software libraries.
Poetics: POETICS (CoPackaging of Terabit direct-detection and coherent Optical Engines and switching circuits in mulTI-Chip moduleS for Datacenter networks and the 5G optical fronthaul): Enabling Terabit capacity optical interconnects requires a paradigm shift in the packaging approach. The electrical interconnect distance between the optical engine and the digital switching chip must be minimized and signal conditioning chips and unwanted components that are required and inevitably lead to increased power consumption and reduced signal integrity, should be removed. It also requires the right combination of photonic and electronic technology to be integrated in order to deliver high performance, low-cost and energy efficient optical engines. POETICS is a H2020 Research and Innovation project funded by the European Union aiming to bring the optical interconnect technology with all performance, functionality and cost credentials and allow the Datacenter (DC) networks to scale and the 5G wired infrastructures to grow.
SHOP4CF: SHOP4CF provides a Smart Human Oriented Platform for Connected Factories.
InterConnect: InterConnect gathers 50 European entities to develop and demonstrate advanced solutions for connecting and converging digital homes and buildings with the next generation electricity sector and smart grids.

National Industrial Research projects

Ontoforce: Ontoforce als semantische speler

National Fundamental Research projects

HiVis: High-tech Visualisation