In this news item, we summarize new projects from June 2023 till September 2023 for you. Enjoy the read!
EngageSDG (2023-2026)
The EngageSDG project is an Erasmus+ project that focuses on building capacity in South-African Development Countries (SADC) universities to contribute to the achievement of the SDGs in their local environments through the use of participatory approaches. Within the project SMITs role is to share their expertise on Citizen Science and Citizen Engagement/ The project is a collaboration with 6 SADC and 5 EU universities, as well as the associations SARUA and OBREAL Global.
Lead: Carina Veeckman & prof dr Leo Van Audenhove
DISA (2023-2025)
The DISA (Digital Inclusion in South Africa: From Digital Difficulties to Inclusive Digital Transition) is a VLIR-UOS short initiative project The main goal of the project is to collect and provide good, up-to-date data on digital inclusion and digital difficulties to support an integrated national perspective and policy framework on digital inclusion DI), to enable different organisations to develop specific actions to address specific DI topics and to provide an instrument to monitor the status on the long term. The project is a collaboration with the CoLab for e-Inclusion and Social Innovation (University of Western Cape).
Lead: prof dr Ilse Mariën & prof dr Leo Van Audenhove
MonaLisa (2024-2029)
MONALISA (A SIOPEN pragmatic clinical trial to MOnitor NeuroblastomA relapse with LIquid biopsy Sensitive Analysis) is a project within the Horizon Europe Cancer Mission call and aims to close existing gaps and establish liquid biopsies as standard-of-care to monitor relapsed/refractory neuroblastoma, as a blueprint for other pediatric cancers. The project will develop a digital decision support tool to help oncologists use the new monitoring and apply patient-reported outcomes to integrate patient viewpoints and assess the effect of minimally invasive, liquid biopsy diagnostics on quality of life. The role of SMIT is to co-create and co-design the data-driven decision support to make it trustworthy (transparent, explainable…) for the different stakeholders.
Lead: prof dr An Jacobs
ClickCallConnect (2023)
The ClickCallConnect project is a research project for the FOD Economy. The main objective is to investigate how customer processes and contact with (staff of) service providers can be improved based on existing practices/current initiatives, to the benefit of both companies and users. This research serves as a basis to establish one or more models, depending on the size of the company and the sector. The models should subsequently be able to be implemented at service providers/companies in Belgium. Within these models, recommendations to promote the digital inclusion of service providers in Belgium will be included.
Lead: prof dr Ilse Mariën
Local Digital Toolbox (2023-2025)
The Local Digital Toolbox (Service contract EU) contributes to the EU aim to create a European Local Digital Twin (LDT) toolbox in support of the ambition to increase the use of LDTs. This is done by a.o providing a detailed digitalisation roadmap, online advisory services to assess communities’ technological readiness for implementing MIM-compliant local data platform and online technical assistance. The role of SMIT in this project (a collaboration between 13 international (consultancy) companies, universities, research organisations, network organisations…) is to provide support on the data-governance of LDTs and to use LDTs in data-driven policy decision processes.
Lead: Karl-Filip Coenegracht & dr. Laurens Vandercruysse
Presence (2024-2027)
The PRESENCE project is a Horizon Europe project that will build a toolset for hyper-realistic and XR-based human-human and human-machine interactions. This should result in improving our daily life by revolutionising the way we work, communicate and, in general, how we participate in social activities. SMIT’s expertise on immersive experience will be used to provide intuitive and realistic user experiences bringing real humans into interactive virtual worlds, enabling real-time and hyper realistic volumetric multi user communications between remotely connected people, developing a novel holoportation system.
Lead: prof dr Wendy Vanden Broeck
DS4SCC (2023-2026)
The DS4SCC (Dataspaces-in.EU – Realising a data space that works for all European citizens) is a project within the Digital Europe program. This data space for smart communities project aims to evolve the blueprint for the smart communities data space in 10-12 pilots, which will validate it in real use to deliver a sustainable European data space that works for all citizens. Therefor the project will establish a federated and innovative Data Space, conduct pilots and refine the Data Space Blueprint and foster Innovation and align with the ecosystems. SMIT’s role in this project is to develop an ethical assessment method for dataspaces and to set-up a monitoring instrument for the Data Space pilots .
Lead: Karl-Filip Coenegracht & prof dr Rob Heyman