A night with upper rising startups from Belgium, and a conversation featuring Prof. Jacques Verly, who leads several labs and innovation programs at the Institut Montefiore. Phasya being one of them, develops software for monitoring a person’s physiological and cognitive states - such as drowsiness, stress, workload, and mind wandering - from physiological signals and images, mainly related to the person’s eyes and face. This software enables one to assess an individual’s ability to perform a task or make a decision, mainly for safety applications, e.g. to monitor the operator of a car or train.

Professor Jacques VERLY, now honorary, is with the Faculty of Applied Sciences (i.e. School of Engineering, which he has been the Vice-Dean of) and, specifically, with its Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, also known as the Institut Montefiore. The institute’s research groups are: Applied and Computational Electromagnetics; Computer Networks; Electronics, Microsystems, Measurement, and Instrumentation; Signal and Image Exploitation, Software Reliability; & Systems and Modeling. The institute features laboratories, including in acoustics and electromagnetic compatibility. It also led to the creation of 6 spin-offs, including Phasya, created in 2015 under the impulse of Prof. J. Verly. 

Along with Phasya, we also invited one local VR startup and one hardware co-working platform run by a foreign entrepreneur to give a comprehensive discussion about trends in China, ecosystem in Europe and China, and how to run businesses in Shenzhen. Welcome!