This summer, The EGG Brussels hosted the 8^th edition of the Brussels Games Festival, a flagship event for board game enthusiasts.

For the occasion, the emblematic The EGG Brussels venue was transformed into a table-top gamers’ wonderland, giving visitors access to 75 showcasing publishers and distributors, some forty associations, clubs and games libraries, 7 specialised stores, 17 tournaments, a secondhand board games exchange, a dedicated area to try out prototype of games that they will be playing in the future, workshops and debates, an all-nighter and much more…

The Brussels Games Festival is a fun-packed event with an educational and engaged-citizen spin to it, highlighting its vocation to use games to promote social and human values and encourage social interaction.

Visitors of all ages were able to come and discover and play with a wide variety of games, from their all-time favourites to the very latest games on the market. Exhibitors offered visitors an impressive array of board games, card games and quests to choose from, plunging players headfirst into fantasy worlds to test their capacity to weave strategies and challenge their powers of imagination and reasoning.

And that’s not all. The Brussels Games Festival has equally hosted some truly tantalizing tournaments, experts demonstrating games, stores, the infamous all-nighter and free access to a multitude of board games for its visitors. Through meeting board game creators, talented illustrators, and enthusiastic publishers, visitors were able to gain a deeper understanding of a table-top gaming world that is in constant motion.

«Our main task is to mobilise an infinite and durably renewable resource: collective intelligence» – Chairman and CEO of Eiffage

Eiffage has been one of Europe’s leading players in Construction and Public Works and Concessions since 1844, with a workforce of 73,500, operating across the construction, real estate and urban development sectors.

Their employees work in all sectors of activity on new-builds or renovation projects for both private customers and public authorities, offering them global, tailored solutions.

In a world where the issue of climate change is omnipresent and the creation of more sustainable and robust towns and infrastructures is in increasing demand, Eiffage is rolling out low carbon constructions on a significant scale, and is ever on the look-out for ways to innovate, making its contribution in a collective drive to acheive sustainable development in this sector.

This event will bring together Europe’s key decision-makers and political leaders who are engaged in the innovation world, to address both the challenges and opportunities facing innovation today in Europe, and discuss the lessons learned by the EIT over the last decade in its endeavour to build a robust and resilient innovation ecosystem.

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) is an independent body created by the European Union in 2008 to bring innovation to the whole of Europe. Today, it is the largest innovation ecosystem in Europe, boasting over 2000 partners.

The EIT aims to connect educational institutions and research organisations so that they can form cross-disciplinary, stimulating partnerships. These are known as innovation communities and each of them is dedicated to finding solutions to specific challenges.

The EIT’s innovation communities develop innovative products and services, set up new businesses and train the next generation of entrepreneurs. By joining forces, they can help entrepreneurs throughout Europe to transform budding ideas into tangible projects.

The founding members of Fintech Belgium are people who are actively engaged in Belgium’s Digital Finance ecosystem. It provides a platform where its members can come together to address issues affecting the industry, and it also represents them outside the community.

Its missions:

• Actively promote the FinTech sector in Belgium and abroad.
• Represent the sector in its dealings with public authorities, the media, investors, the financial sector, research centres and the academic world, etc.
• Share its experience, expertise and data not only with the community, but also on a wider scale, in an aim to make FinTech more appealing and accessible to those who share an interest in this field.
• Forge relationships with other associations in the digital sector in Belgium and beyond.
• Organise conferences/debates, gatherings, brainstorming sessions and panels to discuss issues related to the development of FinTech in Belgium.

FinTech is proud to have succeeded in putting together a high calibre agenda for an audience of 600-700 visitors at The Egg Brussels congress centre.

The EGG Brussels is putting an emphasis on making its events more eco-friendly. Holder of the 3-star Ecodynamic Organisation Label, The EGG Brussels is continuing to implement its environmental action plan.
Today, we are unveiling our brand-new project: a partnership with Alpaca Solutions.

In an effort to reduce waste, our event spaces will be joining forces with an organisation that provides a tangible solution, collecting surplus food from our events. This non-profit is part of a partner ecosystem that can make best use of the waste we generate. Quite apart from the environmental benefits, these actions also have a positive social influence.

Alpaca provides a post-event report detailing each donation made. This report contains details of items collected, the number of portions donated, the amount of CO2 saved and, of course, the organisation that received the donation.

We’re proud of this partnership and of our investment in improving tomorrow’s world.

WindEurope, formerly the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA), is a European association based in Brussels, which promotes the use of wind energy in Europe.

The association has over 600 members, active in more than 50 countries, including manufacturers with a leading share of the global wind energy market, component suppliers, research institutes, national wind and renewable energy associations, electricity suppliers, finance companies and insurance companies.

WindEurope’s Technology Workshop was the place to be for three key topics this year: Wind resource assessment – improving accuracy to strengthen your business case; Analysis of operating wind farms – getting the most out of your operational data; Artificial intelligence, business models and forecasting – enabling new approaches and solutions.

Launch in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a division of Amazon, specializing in on-demand cloud computing services for businesses and individuals.

More than 1000 attendees joined the AWS Brussels Summitat The EGG Brussels. This conference brought the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS (Amazon Web Service) and the cloud.

As consumer identifiers become obsolete and data privacy laws expand their reach, the decades-old technology used in marketing and advertising has been shaken to the core. Companies have reinvented the way in which they collect, share, enrich and act upon customer data while complying with privacy regulations.

In a bid to accelerate the transformation of marketing and advertising practices in an era that is no longer centered on consumer identity, AWS has reinvented the solutions available to customers in this sector. With its unrivaled computing, machine-learning and analysis capabilities, AWS provides first-party data platforms, data collaboration, advertising portals, marketing intelligence and customer experience solutions, as well as compatibility with the most widely used cloud computing partners in the business. Customers can use AWS to easily identify suitable cloud technology and partnership opportunities to enable them to innovate with greater speed, optimize their cost-performance ratios, improve compatibility and increase revenue while processing many petabytes of marketing and advertising data in a matter of milliseconds.

The Belgian insurance sector is gradually recovering from the COVID crisis and its impact on the global economy. According to initial estimates, overall income reached 30.1 billion euros in 2021, an increase of 5.6% on the previous year. These figures are taken from the annual report of Assuralia, the professional federation for insurance companies. In its report covering the previous year, the federation is very much focused on the future, highlighting its partnership with regulators to ensure that companies take a responsible approach to systemic risks, such as natural catastrophes, in the interests of every customer.

On the 16^thand 17^th of June 2022, Wojciech Wiewiórowski, European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) welcomed over 2000 participants, both in-person and remotely, at his conference titled, “The future of data protection: effective enforcement in the digital world”.

With a line-up of over 100 distinguished speakers sharing their different views and visions, a total of 16 breakout sessions, workshops, and more, the two-day conference of the EDPS fostered crucial conversations on the future of data protection.

 In his keynote speech delivered today to conference participants, Wojciech Wiewiórowski stated that he strongly believes that a pan-European data protection enforcement model is going to be a necessary step to ensuring real and consistent high-level protection of the fundamental rights to data protection and privacy across the European Union (EU).

This statement comes after two days of important discussions on the need for effective enforcement, and collective consideration for building a culture of compliance, following reflections on what currently works under the General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) governance model, and what could be improved.

Wojciech Wiewiórowski, EDPS, said: “Such a model would not only mitigate the problem of uneven allocation of responsibilities, but would also help to ensure real consistency in data protection law across the EU, including through strong mechanisms of collegiality. With full respect to the principle of subsidiarity, key investigations, based on a certain threshold, the modalities of which should be further discussed, could be conducted at a central level. This would also aid in overcoming potential issues stemming from incompatible national legislation or patchwork harmonisation attempts.”

End of September, ArcelorMittal Belgium successfully organised its second hackathon. The event took place in The Egg, Brussels, from Saturday morning till Sunday afternoon, non-stop.

The word hackathon is a combination of “hack”, which stands for optimising a programme, and “marathon”. During a hackathon event, there is team collaboration on a certain topic or problem, and a short deadline, when the problem must be solved. Like the sportive event it is named after, the hackathon requires a lot of energy over a demanding period of time. And to get the comparison further, as it brings as well pride when the effort is over, and the target is reached.

Industry 4.0 plays a central role within our ArcelorMittal Belgium sites, with the aim of becoming the ‘smart plant of the future’. As a high-tech and innovative company, we actively deploy the latest techniques in the collection, processing, visualisation and analysis of all kinds of (process) data on a daily basis. These data contribute, among other things, to a safer and more efficient organisation.

During this year’s Challenge (the name of our hackathon), the participants were faced with the task of raising the ArcelorMittal Belgium safety bar even further. Very challenging and modern technologies such as chatbots, artificial intelligence and methods to deal with natural speech and text in a structured way were to be used. In doing so, we wanted to lay the foundations for the digital safety assistant of the future.

The three winning teams were:

• Chatbot – Chatlayer
• Vision Ai – Kapernikov
• NLP – Safe.ly

Each of the winning teams was awarded €2.000 and was given a(n in-house developed) 3D-model of the Challenge safety assistant logo. The event was aimed at students and enterprising young adults. In addition to the fully catered weekend (including funny activities such as drone duck fishing), all participants were given the opportunity to attend several workshops given by absolute experts in the field (universities of Mons, Leuven and Brussels as well as Microsoft).