AIRO IDLab 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. Get a full overview of the fundamental and applied research problems we tackle on the research page.

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Mar 26, 2026 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.
Nov 27, 2025 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.
Nov 23, 2025 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.
Oct 25, 2025 Nomination for Yi Liu at IROS Workshop Yi Liu wins best paper award (3rd place) at the IROS Workshop on Embodied Intelligence for Medical Robotics - Learning, Adaption, and Interaction.
Oct 24, 2025 Dwengo Social Robot Competition 2025-2026 IDLab - AIRO is a proud partner in the social robot competition for secondary schools organized by Dwengo. In this competition students ages 12 to 16 take on the challenge to solve a societally relevant problem using a social robot. In this second edition of the competition, students get challenged to create a robot that supports parents with the upbringing of their children.
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