About Us - i4S

i4S is a multidisciplinary economic valorization consortium supported by the UGhent Industrial Research Fund.

i4S brings together 18 research groups, institutes and consortia with a total of more than 100 researchers around crime, security and technology, digitization and privacy.

i4S is structured around two broad domains "crime" and "security". We distinguish three clusters "technology", "digitization" and "privacy" that transversally connect the two domains, but are also interconnected.

Within the "criminality" application domain, the focus is on stimulating innovation and the development of technologies and applications such as predictive (cyber) policing, predictive profiling, geographic profiling, and dynamic optimisation of patrol routing and investigation resources allocation in time and space.

Within the "security" application domain, attention is paid to both public and private security and innovation and development is complemented by applications in the field of cyber security.

What we do

We function as a direct interface between security top researchers and the industry, governments and security stakeholders.
We identify and initiate multidisciplinary research projects that can benefit the industry and/or society.
We set up (research) collaborations with industry and supporting and monitoring industrial research programs (e.g. via Flanders Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VLAIO), the EU,...).
We actively monitor new research findings with economic potential and stimulate technology development and valorization (IP, industrial proof-of-concept, marketing, etc.)

Research projects

We set up industrial collaborations as short-term consultancy or long-term collaborative research projects.

Services

We offer professional advice and testing services for security technologies and implementations.

Valorization

We bring new products and services from research to market through technology transfer.

Our core expertise

Security & Crime

i4S is led by a strong alpha team, which over the past 25 years has built up fundamental and functional knowledge in both crime and insecurity phenomena. In addition, broad insight has been acquired into both the technological and digital needs of the private and public security stakeholders (including private security companies, police, justice, intelligence and inspection services) and the legal and privacy-related preconditions for the implementation of technological and digital solutions in the security market.

Technology & Digitalization

i4S brings together diverse technological expertise in a wide range of topics such as security and privacy (blockchain technology, cybersecurity, industrial security, data privacy), applied artificial intelligence (NLP and computer vision), analytics and machine learning in the cloud, Internet of Things, human interface technologies and wearables, AR/VR/XR, gaming technologies and many more.

Privacy

i4S unites researchers with a legal, criminological, social sciences or STEM profile around social issues and developments in the context of privacy, information exchange, law enforcement and surveillance.