Erik Mannens

Erik Mannens - Director, IDLab, an imec research group at Antwerp University & Professor, Antwerp & Ghent University

Bio

Erik Mannens is Director at imec-IDLab (UAntwerp) and Professor at the University of Antwerp (Sustainable AI) and at Ghent University (Semantic Intelligence). 
Since 2005, he has successfully managed +160 "interdisciplinary" projects (accounting for 30M euro funding for his team) and teams of 50 to 125 researchers. He received his PhD in Computer Science Engineering (2011) from UGent, his Master in Computer Science (1995) from KU Leuven and his Master in Electro-Mechanical Engineering (1992) from KAHO Ghent.  

Being 50+, from now on he tends to take on only new projects that have a positive & lasting impact on society and "Spaceship Earth" as a whole! #SustainableDevelopmentObjectives ... For example, in 2022 he took six months of operational leadership of SolidLab Flanders and now leads imec UAntwerpen IDLab where we work on Sustainable AI. In that capacity he now leads a Data Science team of +125 Wireless Communication & AI Experts investigating all aspects of the Sustainability of AI.  

Prior to that, he headed a Data Science team of +50 Semantic Technologies & Artificial Intelligence Researchers at Ghent University for more than a decade. In general, he is also committed to the Open Source, Open Access & Open Knowledge movements. In Flanders, he is also part of the Smart City "City of Things" & Open Knowledge Foundation initiative!  

Before joining imec-IDLab in 2005 as project manager, he was a software engineering consultant & Java architect for more than a decade. Since 2008, Erik has been paving the (Linked) Open Data path in Flanders. He stood at the cradle of the first Hackatons and is a founding member of the Open Knowledge Foundation (Belgian Chapter). Since then, he is regularly invited as Linked Open Data evangelist, Smart City expert and Ethical AI specialist at national and international events. 
Currently, he actively participates in several standardization groups of the W3C. Furthermore, his team owns the Open Sourced Linked Open Data Publishing frameworks TheDataTank, R&Wbase, RML, Linked Data Fragments, SOLID & Communica. 

Specialities: Sustainable AI, Ethical AI, Semantic Web, (Linked) Open Data, Big Data Analytics, W3C standardization, Java architect, iDTv, web development  (from its inception).