Methods" seminar | Philine Widmer
More info to come."Methods "seminarsThe Methods Seminar is a series of seminars organized at the University of Namur with the aim of fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge exchange. All seminars take place in a hybrid format.This seminar series focuses on advanced methodological approaches, particularly in the fields of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), video and image analysis, and multimodal analysis.To stay informed about details of upcoming seminars, please subscribe to our mailing list below.
I subscribe to the "Methods" mailing list
See content
TRANSDEM Seminar | Markus Hermann Meckl
Victimization and identity: the post-heroic society
More info to come
All TRANSDEM seminars
See content
Artificial intelligence, a danger for democracy?
Can we still speak of democracy when algorithms influence our electoral choices or participate in the drafting of laws? This topic is explored by Aline Nardi, researcher at the Faculty of Law and member of the Namur Digital Institute (NADI).
See content
REHNam Symposium | Space and Humanity
Humans have always been fascinated by space: they scan the sky and try to understand it. Over time, technological advances provide new observations. These help to improve existing scientific theories while posing new questions.PAF 45€ - Papers and lunch included20€ without lunchFree registration for under-25s and PhD students (with free lunch included for UNamur PhD students).Closing date for registrations 11/03/2026.
I want to register
See content
Digital literacy through fiction: NaDI's interdisciplinary initiative
The Namur Digital Institute (NaDI) is launching a series of original events: "Les Séances du Numérique". Films followed by debates with experts to understand digital challenges and stimulate collective thinking. A project spearheaded by Anthony Simonofski, Anne-Sophie Collard, Benoît Vanderose and Fanny Barnabé.
See content
Citizens' assemblies: gimmicks or levers for change?
For the past fifteen years or so, participatory and deliberative democracy mechanisms have been multiplying: participatory budgets, popular consultations, citizens' panels, and so on. Vincent Jacquet, a political scientist and coordinator of the European research project Citizen Impact (ERC project, European Research Council), studies the impact of these devices from the point of view of governors and citizens.
See content
Sustainable campus
The University of Namur is careful to implement actions and special attentions to reduce and limit the direct environmental impacts of the campus. Since 2013, a series of calls for projects aimed at promoting sustainability on campus have been initiated. Discover also the Carmel, a former convent transformed into student accommodation, conducive to biodiversity and innovative learning projects. The University of Namur also boasts the Domaine d'Haugimont, an exceptional site in the heart of the countryside that offers a unique teaching and research setting for UNamur students and scientists.
See content
The Summer 2025 issue of Omalius magazine is now available!
Omalius is the magazine of the University of Namur. A quarterly that highlights UNamur's research, its experts, educational innovations and topical issues. Discover the July 2025 issue.
See content
Thematic Days
A day to explore, learn, and be inspired.
See content
Defense of doctoral thesis in computer science - Gonzague Yernaux
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
Promoting gender equality in scientific and academic careers
The ISALA NOVA project, initiated by UMONS and UNamur and supported by the Sakura Fund of the Foundation for Future Generations, aims to sustainably transform universities in terms of gender equality.
See content
BNAIC - BENELEARN 2025
BNAIC/BeNeLearn 2025 will be held at the University of Namur under the auspices of the Belgian-Dutch Association for Artificial Intelligence (BNVKI) and the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS). The conference aims at presenting an overview of state-of-the-art research in artificial intelligence and machine learning in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
More information and registration
See content