The 3rd Mobility Data Forum will be organised on May 19 2016, at our new premises iGent. More info can be found on: Mobilty Data Forum

RFID tracing in administering blood projects as a valorisation result of the ICON project HIPS. On August 3 2015 the University Hospital Gent - UZ Gent chose Amaron and Aucxis, both partners in the ICON HIPS project, for the development of a proof of concept for the RFID tracing in administering blood products at the emergency unit. This project started in September and will take around 8 months. More info (in Dutch) can be found at: Amaron and Aucxis HIPS valorisation. 

ICON project WONDER on Interactive, automated support for personalized care services in the television journal with teh ZORA robot. WONDER (Interventions for Wandering and Other behavioral disturbances of persons with DEmentia in nursing homes by personalised Robot interactions) aims to develop an automated and interactive 24/7 care service with Zora - a humanoid robot, successfully used for entertainment and therapy in about 130 Belgian nursing homes. Its goal is to use Zora to trigger positively charged personal memories in persons with dementia, and thus reassure and calm them. The project aims to automatically detect behavioural disturbances in nursing home residents. Furthermore, it explores how Zora can walk around semi-autonomously and interact personally with different residents, as a useful support tool for nurses and caregivers. The press clip can be viewed at: ZORA. 

Our European project FLEX - one of the FIRE projects - has won the Social Impact Award at the Small Cell Forum 2015, given to Sirran Communications, one of the FLEX project partners. Despite the diversity in the FIRE facilities, in terms of available infrastructure and access technologies, there is currently a lack of truly open and operational LTE testbeds (and cellular testbeds in general). There is a steadily increasing demand from the research community, including the industry, to have access to LTE experimentation facilities in different countries. However, the constraints posed by operators and large vendors restrict the configuration capabilities to an extent, which usually discourages testbed operators from deploying such infrastructure.The FLEX (FIRE LTE testbeds for Open Experimentation) initiative is unique as it is the first of its kind to remove these constraints through the development of a truly open and operational LTE experimental facility to the broad community of researchers from academia, research centres and SMEs. “Open” meaning that the facilities are available to external experimenters and the testbed can be configured according to their needs. “Operational” refering to flexibility in accessing the core, gateways, access points and user equipment of the testbeds, and the capability to run full end-to-end services. Two testbed infrastructures were part of the submission for the award, namely NITOS testbed from the University of Thessaly and iLab.t from iMinds. In the context of FLEX, the iMinds wiLab2 and Virtual Wall testbeds are being extended to support controlled experimentation of real-world LTE mobility scenarios, using both physical and emulated radio environments. A description of the LTE possibilities of the iMinds testbed and a demo video were included. 

In May 2015, IBCN joined forces with two research groups from Ghent University to organize ProCare2015. This full-day workshop, held during the Pervasive Health 2015 Conference in Istanbul, focused on the implementation of a process-centered approach in hospitals and home care institutions to enable and enforce patient-centered care delivery. It brought together researchers from different countries with diverse backgrounds to actively discuss solutions in overcoming the challenges posed by the current healthcare system. More info can be found at ProCare2015 and Pervasive Health Research @ ProCare2015. 

Cedric De Boom received the Best Paper Award at the “Making Sense of Microposts Workshop 2015” at the 24th International World Wide Web Conference in May 2015, for the paper “Semantics-driven Event Clustering in Twitter Feeds” by Cedric De Boom, Steven Van Canneyt, Bart Dhoedt. 

Successful CREW Open Access experiments by Arduino at w-iLabt.t Zwijnaarde Within the framework of the CREW project, the Swedish company Arduino came to the iMinds iLab.t premises in Ghent-Zwijnaarde to carry out a CREW Open Access experiment, using the CREW facilities, for their European FIRE research project SandS (Social and Smart). Within the context of the SandS project, part of the Arduino hardware team (David Cuartielles and Ernesto López) visited w-iLab.t Zwijnaarde to add some of their devices to the testbed. SandS is all about enhancing user experience in the Internet of Things: providing a physical and computational networked infrastructure allowing household appliances to better meet the needs of their owners. 6 Arduino Yun boards and 4 SandS motherboards were placed for running stress tests on the wireless connection. An example experiment-scenario would be checking how a connected kitchen would behave in the presence of many other WiFi enabled devices. More info and pictures can be found at: Connected Appliances Tests @ WiLabs2. 

Our ITEA project MEDIATE (Patient Friendly Medical Intervention, 2010-2013) with Barco as Flemish partner, was awarded the ITEA Excellence Award 2015 in the category ‘Business Impact’, in recognition of the outstanding contribution to the ITEA programme. This award was given during the Co-summit in Berlin in March 2015. The ITEA Excellence Awards recognize high-level technical contributions based on true European collaboration that lead to significant results and thus further promote the programme and its goals. This year the ITEA awards of Excellence focused on the key achievements for ITEA: Business impact and Standardisation. More information can be found at ITEA Co-Summit 2015. The MEDIATE project changes life in the operating room ensuring a unique screen for all the enhanced modalities used in parallel. 

CREW/EVARILOS at EU 5G booth at Mobile World Congress 2015
The iMinds-IBCN UGent projects CREW and EVARILOS were selected as one of the 5 demonstrators at the EU 5G booth at the prestigious Mobile World Congress 2015. The demo centred around remote evaluation of RF-based indoor localisation. Many indoor localization solutions seriously underperform in real-world deployments. Performance of wireless solutions is strongly influenced by the wireless environment, in particular the wireless propagation characteristics (that heavily depend on the type of building), and the presence of interference (caused by other devices transmitting in the same spectral band). In the CREW/EVARILOS demo, a benchmarking framework was shown that measures the performance of a specific indoor localization solution in different physical wireless environments (office versus industrial environment) and under different interference conditions (ranging from no interference to heavy interference). The benchmarking framework allows fair performance evaluation of and fair comparison between indoor localization solutions operating under replicable conditions. The benchmarking process is further fully automated by using a robotic platform and can be controlled remotely. The real-life benchmarking of a WiFi fingerprinting solution running in 2 open, large-scale wireless testbeds (an office environment at TU Berlin and an industrial environment at iMinds) was demonstrated. The booth has attracted many visitors, among others , Günther H. Oettinger, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, Andrus Ansip, Vice-president EC, Digital Single Market, and Mario Camoplargo, Director for 'Net Futures’ in DG CONNECT.

Best Paper Award for DesignCon 2015 was given to the paper “ 56  Gb/s Serial Transmission using Duo-binary Signaling”, by Timothy De Keulenaer (INTEC-IMEC), Jan De Geest (FCI), Guy Torfs (INTEC-IMEC), Johan Bauwelinck (Ghent University/iMinds), Yu Ban (INTEC-IMEC), Jeffrey Sinsky (Alcatel-Lucent), Bartek Kozicki (Alcatel-Lucent). More info on DesignCon 2015, which took place in January 2015 in Santa Clara - USA, can be found here. All best paper award winners are listed here. 

Tim Verbelen was awarded the Alcatel-Lucent Bell Scientific Award 2014 for his PhD thesis “Adaptive Offloading and Configuration of Resource Intensive Mobile Applications”. This annual scientific prize is awarded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) through the patronage of Alcatel-Lucent Bell in recognition of an original PhD thesis on information and communication Technology. More information can be found here. 

The Ghent University INTEC Design group was awarded the 3rd biannual Greentouch 1000x award as core partner of the Bi-PON and Cascaded Bi-PON team together with Bell Labs/Alcatel-Lucent and Orange Labs. The Greentouch consortium recognizes the Bi-PON team for the invention of the Bit-interleaving Passive Optical Network or Bi-PON protocol and sustained leadership, technical excellence and promotion of the technology for future access networks. In this collaboration, the INTEC Design group is operating through imec and responsible for the design of the key mixed analog/digital integrated circuits and subsystems to realize the specific Bi-PON and cascaded Bi-PON functions for a new generation of PONs. This new technology reduces the power consumption of the protocol processing in the customer premises equipment (CPE) by more than 10 times. The INTEC Design group is specialized in the research and development of high-speed and high-frequency (opto-) electronic circuits, subsystems and system demonstrators on chip and board level, is currently 20 people strong and part of the IBCN group.

Smart household appliances can help avoid black-out. This is one of the findings the Linear research project presented on 9 December 2014, at the premises of GDF Suez in Brussels, after five years of studying the technical and economic possibilities offered by controllable energy consumption for family dwellings in Flanders. Smart household appliances can help energy suppliers and network operators respond better and faster to hard‐to-predict output from renewable energy sources. With this approach, they can more easily avoid high imbalance costs, especially during the winter. This was also reported in the VRT news, see Linear news (in Dutch).

Rein Houthooft has won the Best Paper Award at The 6th International Workshop on Reliable Networks Design and Modeling (RNDM 2014), held on November 17-19, 2014 in Barcelona, Catalonia-Spain, for the paper entitled “Fault-tolerant Greedy Forest Routing for Complex Networks” by Rein Houthooft, Sahel Sahhaf, Wouter Tavernier, Filip De Turck, Didier Colle and Mario Pickavet.

On Sunday 19 October 2014, the UGent -IBCN team Prof. Eric Laermans, Dimitri Staessens, Joeri Ruyssinck, and Cedric De Boom has won the Eos scientific quiz. In the finale round 2 UGent teams and 1 KUL team competed to win the first prize, 20.000 euro advertisement space in Eos. 

Nicolas Staelens has won one of the QoMEX 2014 Best Reviewer Awards for the 6th International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience, September 2014, Singapore. More information can be found on http://www.qomex2014.org.

Bram Naudts has won the 1st Doctoral Challenge – Memorial to Miroslav Karásek at Networks 2014, the 16th International Telecommunications Network Strategy and Planning Symposium, with the paper "Internet on trains: A multi-criteria analysis of on-board deployment options for on-train cellular connectivity", authors Bram Naudts, Jonathan Spruytte, Jan Van Ooteghem, Sofie Verbrugge, Didier Colle, Mario Pickavet. More information can be found on networks2014. 

Welcome to the 1st International Summer School on eCare - Integrated, sustainable home care, organized August 25 - 29, 2014 in Ghent, Belgium. This Summer School on eCare is first in its kind within Ghent University focusing specifically on eCare challenges and technologies. It presents a good combination of societal aspects and future needs within the home care sector and a technology overview of commonly applied technologies including some basic hands-on exercises. The participants will have the opportunity to present their own research during a poster session and deploy the proposed exercises on the existing home lab facility within iMinds. Additionally, a visit to the research centre of Cretecs, Catholic College Vives will provide for a more practical view on the user experience and requirements within home and elderly care.

The summer school will incorporate a guest lecture from a principal researcher at the Computation Medicine Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH (ICS-FORTH) in Heraklion, Crete, Greece. The laboratory's main research directions are (a) biomedical informatics in support of individualized medicine and, (b) ambient intelligence eHealth environments. The Computational Medicine Laboratory's R&D is carried out in collaboration with health professionals and is supported by 9 researchers, 7 senior s/w and telecommunications engineers, 20 systems and s/w engineers and a varying number of graduate students & undergraduate trainees. It provides for one of the most renowned research activities within patient care in Europe.

More information can be found on Summer School on eCare. 

The 2013 edition of iMinds The Conference takes place on December 5th and for the first time in Brussels, while keeping unchanged the formula to its success – gathering the best and brightest in academia, policy making, business and venture capital. Most problems cannot be solved by a single government, company or organization. We need to join forces to successfully convert digital research into real-life products and services that change people's lives for the better. That is why, this year, we dedicate iMinds The Conference to “digital innovation in Europe”. Featured speakers include: Dirk Pilat (OECD), who will give us his perspective on entrepreneurship in Europe; Bart Decrem (SVP at Walt Disney Company), who will share his adventures as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley; and Edward Boute (Google Enterprise BeLux), who will let us in on the secret of Google’s innovation strategy. More info at iMinds the Conference 2013. 

Steven Bohez, Joeri De Turck, Tim Verbelen, Pieter Simoens en Bart Dhoedt received the Best Paper Award for the paper entitled “Mobile, Collaborative Augmented Reality using Cloudlets” on Mobilware’13, 6th International Conference on MOBILe Wireless MiddleWARE, Operating Systems, and Applications, November 11-12, 2013 Bologna, Italy. 

Our European FP7 project CREW has won the exhibition award in cluster 4 at ICT 2013. The CREW stand at ICT 2013 showcased several cognitive radio (networking) experiments and explained how experimenters can benefit from open access to various advanced wireless test facilities and cognitive components. Five different demonstrations were shown: (1) ProtoStack modular stack composition for cognitive networking; (2) Experiment-based validation of control channels for cognitive radio systems; (3) Dynamic TV White Spaces geo-location database; (4) Online energy consumption evaluation of spectrum sensing in the imec sensing engine; and (5) Cognitive MAC schemes for multi-hop wireless networks." ICT 2013 took place in November in Vilnius. More info can be found on the CREW web page. 

Steven Latré, Filip De Turck and Jeroen Famaey have won the best paper award at the 7th International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security (AIMS 2013) in Barcelona, Spain this year. They are co-authors of the paper titled, "Design and Evaluation of Tile Selection Algorithms for Tiled HTTP Adaptive Streaming". Co-authors include Jens Devloo, Nils Lamot, Jelle van Campen and Evi Weymaere who are students at the University of Ghent, and Ray Brandenburg from the research institute TNO in the Netherlands.

The FP7 EULER project organizes its Summer School 2013 on "Graph and routing dynamics:
models and algorithms" at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona (Spain) on July 1-5, 2013. Details about the lecture programm, part of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) are available at: EULER Summer School 2013. This intensive Summer School is addressed to MSc, PhD and Post-Docs but also researchers with a background in algorithmic graph theory, graph dynamics modeling, routing models and algorithms as well as proficiency in English. The EULER Summer School 2013 courses and lectures aim at providing an excellent preparation for entering a PhD in Computer Science, Computer Networks, and Applied Algorithmic Graph Theory. Lectures and courses are part of the academic curses falling under the ECTS system. Registration is now open (until June 15). Attendance fee (only 150€) includes: participation to all lectures, summer school printed and digital copy of the course material, lunches and coffees breaks, and social events.

 

The IBCN research group (Prof. Filip De Turck, Prof. Piet Demeester) organises the IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2013). This conference takes place from Monday May 27 until Friday May 31 in Ghent (conference venue: Het Pand, Onderbergen 1, 9000 Gent in the heart of the city center). More info on www.im2013.org. 

 

The European project SPITFIRE won the Best Demo Award at the Future Internet Assembly conference 2013 (FIA2013, May 2013), for the Hands-on-Fire demo session in Dublin, Ireland, with the SPITFIRE demo titled "True Self-Configuration for the Internet of Things". Isam Ishaq of the IBCN research group was part of the demo team in Dublin, together with Henning Hasemann, Myriam Leggieri, Christian Tille, and Oliver Kleine of the SPITFIRE project.  The demo ranked first out of 16 others. More info can be found on SPITFIRE demo. 

 

Ivo Couckuyt and Prof. Tom Dhaene (IBCN research group) have won the IEEE SPI Best Paper Award for the paper “Efficient Optimization of the Integrity Behavior of Analog Nonlinear Devices Using Surrogate Models”, authored by C. Gazda, D. Vande Ginste, H. Rogier, I. Couckuyt, T. Dhaene, K. Stijnen, H. Pues; at the 17th IEEE Workshop on Signal Propagation on Interconnects (SPI 2013), Paris (France), pp. 27-30, May 2013.

 

On December 5th 2012, the 13th FEA PhD symposium took place at Het Pand in Ghent.  Doctoral students presented their research to a broad audience of engineers at the symposium. The program additionally included several 1 hour workshops and an interactive scientific quiz. For more information please visit http://symposium.fea.ugent.be/. 

 

On October 25th - 26th 2012 the European Workshop on Software Defined Networks took place in Darmstadt, Germany. The workshop proceedings will be published in IEEE Xplore. More information can be found on EWSDN 2012. Prof. Didier Colle is member of the Technical Programme Committee. 

 

Prof. Ingrid Moerman, dr. Stefan Bouckaert and ir. Wei Liu (IBCN research group), co-authors of the paper entitled "Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Wireless Applications Inside Aircraft Cabins", Heller, C., C. Bluemm, S. Bouckaert, W. Liu, I. Moerman, P. Van Wesemael, S. Pollin, T. Solc, and Z. Padrah, received the best paper award at the 2012 IEEE/AIAA 31st Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), held in Williamsburg, VA, USA, 14-18 October 2012.

 

Bram Naudts (IBCN) wins Best Young Presenter's Award at 51th FITCE Congress in POZNAN (September 2012) with a presentation on "A value network approach for the evaluation of emerging internet services on-board of trains". More info at FITCE award 2012. 

 

In August 2012, Dr. Francesco Ferranti (IBCN) was awarded the President's Memorial Award in honor of Norm Violette awarded at the annual IEEE EMC Symposium in Pittsburgh (USA), for the significant technical contributions to parametric macromodeling and model order reduction for EMC and SI purposes during his Ph.D. work at Ghent University. 

 

In July 2012, Dr. Francesco Ferranti (IBCN) was awarded the Anile-ECMI Prize for Mathematics in Industry awarded at the ECMI 2012 conference in Lund (Sweden). The prize is given to a young researcher for an excellent PhD thesis in industrial mathematics successfully submitted at a European university in 2010-2012.