Institutions

The Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) was founded in 1834 and has many distinguished alumni, including three Nobel Prize winners: J. Bordet (Medicine), A. Claude (Medicine), I. Prigogine (Chemistry) and F. Englert (Physics). The Laboratory of Anatomy, Biomechanics and Organogenesis, or LABO, (www.ulb.ac.be/~labo) is located in the ULB Faculty of Medicine. The LABO gained in the last fifteen years, experience in the field of Clinical Biomechanics thanks to the multi-disciplinary approach of its members (including orthopaedics, physiotherapists, radiologists, biologists, engineers). Research topics include: joint kinematics, motion analysis, medical imaging, musculoskeletal modelling and data fusion. The last 6 years LABO performed pioneering work by integrating novel functional evaluation methods into serious gaming environment in collaboration with partner VUB. The LABO is in charge of the Centre for Functional Evaluation of the ULB Erasme Hospital and been involved in various EC-funded projects (VAKHUM, Bionet, JPD, Multimod, STEP, LHDL, DhErgo and VPH-NoE) and two projects funded by InnovIris. The LABO scientific, technical and clinical knowledge available from the LABO will be used throughout the current project.

ETRO is the department of Electronics and Informatics at the Engineering Faculty of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Within ETRO three laboratories are covering a wide range of generic technologies in Micro- and Photonelectronics (LAMI), Speech & Audio Processing (DSSP), Multidimensional Signal Processing & Communication (IRIS). Image/video processing and machine vision (now generalized to multidimensional signal processing) are central research activities. Early activities in biomedical engineering were focused on smart data acquisition systems, signal processing and diagnostic functions. Afterwards activities were diversified to various medical imaging modalities and data fusion. We also moved into new application domains like remote sensing, security, industrial inspection, gaming, personalized health systems, e-health, active vision, multimedia. ETRO has a long history on (medical) image processing and (medical) signal processing. Research on these topics has been funded by EU, the Belgian government, the Brussels Government, the university, iMinds, Innoviris, FWO, IWT/Vlaio and others. ETRO also has strong bounds to the university hospital UZ-Brussel, but has collaborations with other Brussels hospitals. They currently hold several patents on segmentation methods for medical image analysis and on visualization of medical data. Within this medically oriented team in ETRO, they have worked on several research themes in the context of serious gaming, including social networks for behaviour change and fitness, serious games for rehabilitation of children from cerebral palsy and data storage and mining.

Founded in 1846, the RBINS is one of the major Scientific Belgian Federal Institute (FSI) having many responsibilities in scientific expertise at national and international level. It is involved in important scientific research activities and carries out public service missions. It is open to everyone through the Museum of Natural Sciences. RBINS houses a varied and exceptionally rich zoological collection, a famous palaeontological collection, completed by prehistoric items and a mineral and geological collection. For physical specimens the grand total is about 36.000.000 specimens or items with around 100,000 primary types of fossil and extant species. This ranks the Institute at the third position in Europe behind the Natural history museums in London and in Paris and places RBINS among the world's top ten collections in terms of volume of specimen stored and available for research. The RBINS scientific library is one of the largest documentary resources of NH in Belgium. It offers 695,368 volumes. The Filing Cabinet owns about 35,000 geographical, hydrological and geological maps. The unique Dautzenberg collection contains rare volumes concerning conchology. In this respect, the RBINS plays an important role both at national and international levels in matters concerning heritage management and development across a number of fields: collections conservation, preservation and curation, databanks, libraries and specialized archives, while through their permanent and temporary exhibitions, the role is further extended into educational and dissemination activities.

ADIA, ‘Association for the Dissemination of archeological information’ has existed since 1985 and has the role to spread knowledge to the general public in the fields of Prehistory and Human evolution. The diffusion media are varied: development of Museum halls in these areas, creation of educational workshops for primary and secondary school students, publications, website and virtual museums. ADIA was also jointly responsible for the scientific content of l’Espace de l’Homme de Spy. In recent years, ADIA has focused on the development of multimedia tools. A Virtual Museum of Prehistory will be put online soon, presenting the Palaeolithic art pieces scanned in 3D. Another website is in preparation on « Ishango », a famous African archaeological site. "Anthropology" workshops for secondary school students also now use a tablet application developed by ADIA.