The Digital Sessions are an initiative launched by the NaDI, the digital research institute at UNamur. The latter brings together researchers from the Faculties of law, informatics and EMCP.

To stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration, NaDI has launched a call for projects. One of the selected projects? Les Séances du Numérique, an original format in which fiction becomes the starting point for debate. Each meeting begins with a film screening, followed by an interdisciplinary conference on a digital-related social issue.

The ambition of these sessions is simple: to educate about digital issues through fiction, and to confront a variety of viewpoints.

This format extends the experience of the podcast Pop-Code already hosted by Anthony Simonofski and Benoît Vanderose, but with an added dimension: interdisciplinarity and direct exchange with the audience. After the film, everyone can question the experts and enrich the reflection.

Digital technology will be at the heart of future screenings, with a dynamic that is both collaborative and rooted in current affairs:

1. Fostering collaboration between several NaDI centers to bring disciplines into dialogue (as was the case at the first session with CRIDS and PReCISE).
2. Bouncing off themes linked to current events to guarantee the relevance of exchanges.

Four sessions will be offered per year, open to all, with one priority: reaching out to citizens. The films are there to give the event a cultural and scientific outreach.

Eventually, the team would like to diversify its formats: screenings in cinemas like Caméo, broadcasting series, even playconferences where we play a video game during the debate. The idea: to use fiction in all its forms to kick-start discussion.

• Fanny Barnabé, lecturer at CRIDS / NaDI
• Anne-Sophie Collard, professor at the EMCP Faculty
• Anthony Simonofski, professor at the EMCP Faculty
• Benoît Vanderose, professor at the Computer Science Faculty

In collaboration with the Knowledge Confluence and the Administration de la communication

Several projects are already aiming to entrust part of the legislative work to artificial intelligence (AI). While for the time being, these are mainly tools for transcribing parliamentary debates, translating or analyzing archives, drafting tools or legislative texts are also being considered. The use of AI may seem interesting: it can improve readability or facilitate standardization. But, depending on how it is used, it may not spontaneously respect the fundamental principles of the legislative process, such as legality, proportionality or equality. These requirements, established by the Constitutional Court, are the subject of numerous case law decisions. As part of a doctoral thesis, Aline Nardi, is sifting through them to see whether the use of AI is possible in legislative processes.

His finding? "For csome more critical tasks, which go beyond simple editing, problems arise." In particular, she points to the opacity of the reasoning, since "it is difficult to trace why the AI suggests such and such a lead from the query submitted to it". Yet, in a state governed by the rule of law, the legislative process must be transparent and comprehensible if it is to be challenged by parliamentarians and citizens.

There are also issues of democratic legitimacy: "The company that develops the system used by parliamentary assemblies can influence decisions that are extremely important for a nation. Is a parliamentarian still useful if he or she is only there to ratify decisions made by a machine?" asks the jurist.

On the citizens' side, AI has been transforming election campaigns for some years now. Micro-targeting, automated disinformation, manipulation of emotions via social networks: these are all formidable tools that can skew public debate. The 2016 US presidential campaign clearly illustrates this problem."Cambridge Analytica, for example, targeted and influenced undecided voters whose positions could be tilted in Donald Trump's favor. Around 20 million undecided voters thus received tailored messages, such as memes, videos, blog posts in favor of Trump", recalls Aline Nardi. Combined with social networks, AI therefore calls into question the right of voters to form an opinion based on pluralist and reliable information.

More recently, the Romanian Constitutional Court invalidated the 2024 presidential election on the grounds of misuse of AI and lack of transparency in digital campaigns. "This affected the freely expressed nature of the citizens' vote and in particular their right to be properly informed, explains Aline Nardi.

The European Union is trying to take action against these abuses. Several regulations have been put in place. They aim to frame digital technologies and limit their harmful effects on the information space, particularly during electoral processes. These regulations include the Digital Services Act (DSA), the AI Regulation and the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising Regulation (TTPA). These regulations have prompted Google, and more recently Meta, to stop allowing political, electoral and social issue advertising in the European Union.

"However, questions remain as to the applicability, concrete implementation and effectiveness of certain standards stemming from bodies of digital law", alerts Aline Nardi, who calls for "sortir de ce flou juridique".

Japan is a world reference when it comes to video games. Nintendo, Sony, Sega... so many companies that have left their mark on contemporary popular culture. Fanny Barnabé knows this industry well. A lecturer at the Faculté Économie Management Communication sciencesPo (EMCP) and researcher at the CRIDS/NaDI research institute, she specializes in game studies, a field of research devoted to the study of games. After defending her doctoral thesis on videogame détournement in the fictional universe of Pokémon in 2017, she spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Ritsumeikan Center For Game Studies (Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto), the archipelago's largest video game research center. Internationally recognized, the Center is fortunate to host an exceptional and unpublished archive, thanks to a donation from the giant Nintendo.

Many years and research work later, Fanny Barnabé visited Japan once again at the end of May, on an academic mission. The aim: to present the latest work being carried out at UNamur, particularly in edutainment or "serious game"and, she hopes, lay the foundations for new partnerships and student exchanges.

The Faculty of Informatics has long-standing links with the National Institute of Informatics (NII), an internationally recognized research institute located in the heart of Tokyo. Each year, Master's and PhD students from the faculty are hosted there for a period of four to six months to carry out internships and research projects, via a specific collaboration agreement (Memorandum Of Understanding agreement, or MOU). It's an experience much appreciated by students and PhD students alike, on both scientific and human levels.

Gilles Perrouin, researcher and chairman of the Faculty of Computer Science's Research Commission, guides these students through the presentation of their research topic, often focused in the fields of software engineering, artificial intelligence (AI) or, more recently, green AI. "These are research fields that are evolving very quickly", Gilles Perrouin points out. "There's a lot of debate right now around AI's energy consumption. It's a bit of an oxymoron to say that we can do green AI.But we're working on it via the exploration of smarter techniques when looking for promising solutions to avoid resorting to systematic training of the neural network, which is very costly in terms of energy"explains the researcher. The collaboration has led to the exploration of other areas of AI, such as sign language recognition (Professor Benoît Frénay), in addition to topics in formal methods and software engineering (Professors Pierre-Yves Schobbens and Xavier Devroey).

At the heart of the Mathematics Department, Alexandre Mauroy, professor and researcher at the Namur Institute for Complex Systems (naXys), is working with his long-time collaborator and friend Yoshihiko Susuki from the prestigious University of Kyoto on a project co-funded by F.N.R.S and JSPS (Japan) to study dynamical systems. "These are so-called 'non-linear' phenomena that do not respect the rules of proportionality. The equations are therefore very difficult, if not impossible, to solve in practice, explains Alexandre Mauroy. "To get around this problem, we mobilize techniques like operator theory, which we're studying as part of this project." This has the advantage of combining theoretical aspects with practical applications, particularly in the field of electrical distribution networks. "These are complex systems, with slow and fast dynamics. An interesting case for which mathematical tools need to be adapted", continues Alexandre Mauroy. This first positive partnership has already led to research visits between the two countries, and promises new collaborations in the future.

In a related field, Riccardo Muolo has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Science Tokyo since 2023, after completing a PhD thesis at UNamur under the supervision of Professor Timoteo Carletti. Building on the knowledge acquired during his PhD on network dynamics, Riccardo Muolo is now interested in network synchronization theory, a mathematical model that enables us to understand a wide variety of systems: from fireflies to electrical networks to the functioning of the human brain: "For example, in the brain, abnormal synchronization of neuronal networks is associated with pathologies such as epilepsy or Parkinson's. The recent power grid failure in Spain can also be analyzed through this theory", details the researcher.

Students wishing to spend part of their degree course in Japan have the opportunity to do so, thanks to the various agreements UNamur has signed with Japanese institutions. This is the case with the National Institute of Informatics (NII), but also with Soka University and Sophia University (Chiyoda), with which UNamur has signed framework agreements.

After winning the prestigious "Best Research Paper Award" at the SERVSIG conference by the American Marketing Association in 2024 for her thesis paper, Floriane Goosse, a researcher at the NaDI-CeRCLe research center, is among the two winners of the ServCollab Scholarship 2025, an international doctoral scholarship awarded by an American organization dedicated to promoting scientific research with high societal impact.

No fewer than 37 doctoral students from universities around the world were in the running to receive this scholarship. Two researchers were chosen after an in-depth selection process: Griffin Colaizzi, a PhD student in psychology at Northeastern University (USA), and Floriane Goosse, a PhD student at UNamur within NaDI-CeRCLE.

New technologies to empower people with disabilities

Supervised by Professors Wafa Hammedi (UNamur) and Dominik Mahr (Maastricht University), Floriane Goosse's thesis explores how new technologies, such as intelligent voice assistants, can empower people with disabilities, particularly the visually impaired, and thus significantly improve their well-being.

A high-potential project that convinced the members of the ServCollab jury, made up of eminent researchers in the field. The jury was particularly impressed by the young researcher's methodological rigor and praised her alignment with the principles of Transformative Service Research as well as her deep determination to create a tangible impact on the lives of so-called vulnerable people.

Triple recognition for Floriane Goosse

Floriane Goosse also took part in the 19th International Research Symposium on Service Excellence in Management (QUIS19), the bi-annual benchmark conference in service management, held in Rome in early June. On this occasion, his research once again distinguished itself by winning the prize for best research with societal impact, awarded by the conference's scientific committee. This prestigious international recognition crowns a rigorous and deeply committed body of work. Three major recognitions in less than a year, saluting both the scientific excellence and the strong societal impact of a particularly promising piece of research.