Research centers
Building on a tradition of computer science research at the University of Namur, NaDI federates six research centers focusing on different aspects of the digital society.
See content
Contact and organization
Contact
Co-President
Bruno Dumas
bruno.dumas@unamur.be
Co-President
Alexandre de Streel
alexandre.destreel@unamur.be
Organization
Discover the members
See content
Big data and artificial intelligence
NADI offers extensive expertise in artificial intelligence: bio-inspired robotics, robust, interactive, interpretable and safe machine learning, automatic program verification, declarative programming, business intelligence, knowledge representation and automatic software testing. This has already led to numerous collaborations with medical experts, industry and civil society. Along with other areas of expertise at NADI, AI experts are also exploring the educational, ethical, societal and legal implications of AI.
See content
Collaborative economy
The collaborative economy refers to marketplaces that provide access to goods, services or skills through peer-to-peer exchanges. NADI explores the economic, technological and societal/environmental impacts of these exchanges.
See content
Co-innovation and co-creation
Innovation has become increasingly complex. Developing appropriate solutions to our society's growing challenges requires exploring uncommon sources of solutions and combining the efforts of different stakeholders, including citizens or consumers. Co-innovation and co-creation analyze the methods, tools and governance that foster these participatory and collaborative approaches.
See content
From video games to artificial intelligence, a stopover in Japan
Japan is almost 10,000 kilometers from Belgium, a country that fascinates, not least for its rich culture full of contrasts. Researchers at UNamur maintain close ties with several Japanese institutions, particularly in the fields of computer science, mathematics and video games. Let's take a look at some of these collaborations..
See content
EMCP Faculty: three researchers win awards - #3 When AI becomes more human: Florence Nizette (NaDI) wins an international award
This summer's third and final focus on the NaDI-CeRCLe research center, which has gained international recognition in recent weeks thanks to awards won by three young researchers in service management. Following on from Floriane Goosse and Victor Sluÿters, we invite you to discover the work of Florence Nizette, a young researcher working on Artificial Intelligence technologies.
See content
Public defense of doctoral thesis in computer science - Antoine Gratia
Abstract
Deep learning has become an extremely important technology in numerous domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, and autonomous systems. As neural networks grow in size and complexity to meet the demands of these applications, the cost of designing and training efficient models continues to rise in computation and energy consumption. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has emerged as a promising solution to automate the design of performant neural networks. However, conventional NAS methods often require evaluating thousands of architectures, making them extremely resource-intensive and environmentally costly.This thesis introduces a novel, energy-aware NAS pipeline that operates at the intersection of Software Engineering and Machine Learning. We present CNNGen, a domain-specific generator for convolutional architectures, combined with performance and energy predictors to drastically reduce the number of architectures that need full training. These predictors are integrated into a multi-objective genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), enabling an efficient search for architectures that balance accuracy and energy consumption.Our approach explores a variety of prediction strategies, including sequence-based models, image-based representations, and deep metric learning, to estimate model quality from partial or symbolic representations. We validate our framework across three benchmark datasets, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Fashion-MNIST, demonstrating that it can produce results comparable to state-of-the-art architectures with significantly lower computational cost. By reducing the environmental footprint of NAS while maintaining high performance, this work contributes to the growing field of Green AI and highlights the value of predictive modelling in scalable and sustainable deep learning workflows.
Jury
Prof. Wim Vanhoof - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Gilles Perrouin - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Benoit Frénay - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Pierre-Yves Schobbens - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Clément Quinton - University of Lille, FranceProf. Paul Temple- University of Rennes, FranceProf. Schin'ichi Satoh - National Institute of Informatics, Japan
See content
EMCP Faculty: three award-winning researchers - #2 Victor Sluÿters, the doctoral student who deciphers employee behavior in crisis situations
A flurry of awards for the NaDI-CeRCLe research center in recent weeks. The service management research of three young doctoral students from the EMCP Faculty has been recognized by their peers at leading international scientific events: Floriane Goosse, Victor Sluÿters and Florence Nizette. This summer, we invite you to discover their careers and their work.
See content
Seminar: Gathering the views of small children and informing them to engage their participation. Cross-disciplinary and cross-border perspectives
This seminar is aimed at researchers as well as (future) childcare professionals - educators, carers, childcare workers - who wish to question this issue and equip themselves to better listen to and include young children. Thanks to an interdisciplinary, cross-border approach, experts from the fields of psychology, pedagogy, law and the human sciences will share their knowledge and experience. This time of exchange will provide a better understanding of how to foster children's information and participation by adapting to their abilities and needs.
Registrations
Read more
See content
Vivre la Ville | What technologies for the city of 2030?
The program
Interventions by experts and researchers in the field of data science, , AI, digital twins, digital law and participatory processes.Registrations on the Vivre la Ville... website.
See content
EMCP Faculty: Working together to transform
In September 1961, a few professors and fifteen students inaugurated the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Namur. Later renamed the Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales et de gestion, or FSESG, in over 60 years of existence, it has trained thousands of students who have become experts and decision-makers in key fields: economics, management, communication and political science. In September 2024, it changed its name to EMCP or Faculté Économie Management Communication sciencesPo. A change of name, symbol of a visionary mutation.
See content