Welcome to AIRO

IDLab AIRO Ghent University – imec

AIRO is a research team part of the research group IDLab. Our team is led by Prof. Joni Dambre, Prof. Francis wyffels, and Prof. Tony Belpaeme. Together with our team of researchers and students, we work on interdisciplinary research in the fields of AI and Robotics, ranging from social robotics to fringe machine learning. The lab has vast experience with neural networks and ended up several times as a winning team in international Kaggle competitions on image recognition.

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News

2026 VALE Workshop

We are pleased to announce the Fourth International Workshop on Value Engineering in AI (VALE ‘26), which will take place in Bremen, Germany, as part of the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 15-17 August 2026.
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Workshop on Local Generative AI for Education in Tanzania

Eva Verhelst and Mathieu De Coster recently travelled to Mzumbe University in Morogoro, Tanzania, to install a new GPU workstation and deliver a two-day workshop on running generative AI models locally for educational applications. The visit marks a small but meaningful anniversary: the server room that now houses the workstation was inaugurated almost exactly ten years ago by the Belgian ambassador at the time, Paul Cartier. A decade later, the same room is hosting a new generation of hardware, this time dedicated to generative AI research and teaching in Tanzania.
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Seminar on Artificial Intelligence for Socially Intelligent and Cognitively Inspired Robots

How can artificial intelligence empower robots that are socially intelligent? Can human cognition be an inspiration for technical advances-or vice versa? And how can robots be developed to be beneficial for society? These questions require an interdisciplinary approach, on the boundary between artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics and design.
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Search Functionality in the Flemish Sign Language Dictionary

Flemish Sign Language (VGT) is used daily by thousands of people in Flanders (Belgium). The Flemish Sign Language dictionary records over 11,000 signs of the VGT dictionary. In a world first, VGTC and IDLab-AIRO (UGent-imec) have introduced search functionality for this dictionary.
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AIRO at Dag Van De Wetenschap 2025

Like in previous years (2023, 2024), IDLab-AIRO was present at the yearly dag van de wetenschap (science day) event held in the Ghent city library.
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