UCL

General Description
Founded in 1425, the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) is one of the oldest complete universities in the world. Research is one of the driving forces at UCL: 4,300 people, 200 laboratories, in close collaboration with companies, the public sector and international bodies. Via the people it works with, UCL is doing its bit to contribute to the knowledge society and promote its cultural heritage, participate in the social revival and lend a hand to the economy in the Brussels and Walloon regions. The excellence of research at UCL is reflected in its ability to attract people on an international scale: more than 600 doctoral students from all over the world, more than 200 research contracts signed with foreign universities and companies amongst the thousand of contracts signed each year. The university also has the mission to promote the economic benefits of its research, by the way of technology transfers, license agreements or the creation of spinoff companies. UCL has for example created about 40 spinoff companies since the early 80’s, among wich 1/3 in the ICT sector. With main objective to catalyse the development of scientific research, to promote synergies and to enrich the partnership so as to develop the scientific assets at the industrial level, the Research Management Office of the UCL has edited a collection of booklets gathering the competence of its research units by themes. Up to now, nine themes have been covered:

■ ICT

■ Materials

■ Biotechnology and biomedical applications

■ Biomedical engineering

■ Cancerology

■ Environment and sustainable development

■ Organisation: innovation and management

■ Applied biology, agriculture and environment

■ Food science and nutrition

www.uclouvain.be/en-349.html

ICT at UCL
Designing and managing complex information systems have always been major concerns for ICT research. Software engineering, artificial intelligence, human computer interfaces and their applications in e-learning and other information systems are key research areas at UCL. The strength of a complete university like UCL is to cover this area from the technological research with strong links with mathematical modeling to social communication and linguistics research. UCL competences in ICT also include many aspects of wireless communications, microwave circuits, antenna and propagation. Mobility and networking of communication devices are key challenges for personalized communications. At UCL, multidisciplinarity is really a keyword and researchers from the Louvain School of Engineering are for example working together with researchers from the Medicine Faculty on large information spaces that describe the behaviour of tissues, cells, genes, proteins with the help of nanosensors. The ICT activity at UCL is therefore a very active field connected to numerous European research networks and ensuring its presence in the most active international scientific societies of the domain. It has also generated many spin-off companies and strong links have been established with regional technological centres, SMEs, large companies, universities, as well in Belgium as abroad. Illustrative research topics at UCL:

■ Algorithmics and theory of computation

■ Wireless communication

■ Artificial intelligence and machine learning

■ Bioinformatics

■ Biomedical signal processing

■ Electronic systems (mixed-signals circuits and systems)

■ High performance computing

■ ICT and society

■ 2D and 3D image and signal processing

■ Information systems and data bases

■ Human-computer interactions

■ Linguistic engineering

■ Micro and nano information systems

■ Networks and distributed systems

■ Optimisation and operations research

■ Programming languages and systems

■ Security and cryptography

■ Signal processing and communications

■ Software engineering

■ Systems and control

■ RFID security and development

■ Software lifecycle

■ Development methodology

■ Open source based research

■ Sensors networks

■ Web technologies

For more details about the research activities in ICT at UCL:
www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/recherche/documents/Fiches_TIC_Web(1).pdf

Many technologies and patents are available for:

■ technology transfer

■ contract research

■ licensing

For more informations, please contact:

Université catholique de Louvain (UCL)
Interface cell (Research Management Office)
Place de l’Université, 1
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)
Phone: +32 10 47 24 97
Fax: +32 10 47 48 30
E-mail: info-adre@listes.uclouvain.be