UMONS
" The UMONS Health Research Institute, on the initiative of Justine Gaugue, Laurence Ris and Mandy Rossignol, in collaboration with the MUMONS, have set up a user-friendly and pleasant website (www.home-stress-home.com) for children and young people, containing information, resources and a link to an online survey to assess anxiety levels. The data will be collected for research purposes to better understand the development of anxiety disorders in often neglected populations: the children and the young adults in school or early working life. This interface, based on the results of the survey, will make it possible to provide personalized feedback to the user, in order to direct him/her towards relaxation strategies or specialists if the level of anxiety measured is very high. Other surveys and tools will be added later on to allow longitudinal monitoring of the impact on mental and physical health of the stress generated by the current crisis. The objective is to develop this...

Read more: Justine Gaugue, Professor, Laurence Ris, Professor - Mandy Rossignol, Professor

UCLouvain, Datatext
“The project aims at measuring the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the French-speaking Belgium population through the analysis of discourses on social media. In particular, we work on an open corpus of (today) 4.000 tweets from politicians, 30.000 from the media and 100.000 from the population. All messages include a Covid-19 related expression. We focus on three main research topics: (1) the diachronic evolution of discourses, from the emergence of the disease in China to reopening plans, through lockdown measures; (2) the impact of political discourse on the acceptance of measures by citizens and (3) the role of the language used by the media in measures’ acceptance and anxiety of the population.”
Funding: Seeking funding 
Contact: Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  Website: https://uclouvain.be/instituts-recherche/ilc/miil/reseaux-sociaux.html 

ULiège + Mesylab SRL
" How to securely return to normalcy at work? All countries consider to lift the lockdown, but few have executed it. There are no "best practices". Questions abound: What are the risks? What are the most effective measures? Will communities follow? What are the consequences for our individual lives? Who decides how to proceed? AIMS OF THE PROJECT GIGA aims at defining the best possible approach to opening up again by involving its members. Your opinion matters. GIGA has sought assistance in conducting this real time experiment from political scientists, philosophers, lawyers and medical doctors. "
Contact: This project is supported by the GIGA office and is coordinated by the ad hoc Advisory Committee made up of expert political scientists in participation (Dr. F. Thoreau, Dr. C. Parotte, Dr. P. Delvenne, Dr. C. Fallon), a political and ethicist philosopher (Dr. F. Caeymaex) and doctors (Dr. Y. Beguin, Dr. G. Darcis).

UMONS 
" On the basis of the official figures published by the national crisis committee, Olivier Debauche ("Computing, Software and Artificial Intelligence" department, Faculty Poytechnique, UMONS) has published a graph every day (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) which shows the evolution of the pandemic situation in Belgium by means of GeoAI. The goal is to show graphs and especially to explain why and how the curves evolve. "
Publication References: https://covid.engineering
Contact: Olivier DEBAUCHE UMons / Faculty of Engineering Infortech / ILIA Unit rue de Houdain 9 B-7000 Mons Belgium Phone: +32 65 37 40 59
Comment: Member of the consortium "covid-19 Mathematical Modelisation"

ULiège. ULiège Library
" In order to highlight the Open Access research published by our scholars, ULiège Library has launched a harvesting project (called "Mosa") of existing Belgian and Luxembourgish Open Access publication platforms and academic bibliographies. Mosa aims to act as an aggregator of institutional and federal publication platforms. At this time, Mosa harvests more than 10 repositories from KCE, KU Leuven, UAntwerp, UCLouvain, UGent, ULB, ULiège, UNamur, Unilu, and USL-B on a daily basis. To get integrated into Mosa, harvested records need to have at least one full text in open access or in restricted access. Mosa contains more than 590,000 records (327,000 research articles, 66,000 proceedings, 47,000 dissertations, 40,000 lectures and posters, 35,000 book chapters…). A dedicated search slot containing only Belgian and Luxembourgish research publications and communications around COVID-19 has been created within Mosa. "
Contact: Paul Thirion &lt...

Read more: Paul Thirion, Chief Librarian - François Renaville, Head of Library Systems

ULiège, CHU - Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium
" Nous faisons face à une pandémie d'infection COVID-19. Ce virus pathogène est source de complications pulmonaires aggravant fortement le pronostic de nos patients. De nos jours, tant les mécanismes physiopathologiques en cause que les marqueurs de sévérité de l'atteinte restent indéterminés. Il apparaît donc comme urgent de pouvoir identifier des marqueurs diagnostiques, pronostiques et prédictifs pour nos patients. Dans ce contexte, plusieurs voies rapidement explorables nous apparaissent comme critiques. Le but final de cette étude est de contribuer à une prise en charge plus ciblée des patients porteurs d'une infection au SRAS-Cov-2. "
Funding: Fonds Léon Frederic
Publication References: Dix publications représentatives : 1) Prevention of murine radiogenic thymic lymphomas by tumor necrosis factor or by marrow grafting. HUMBLET C, GREIMERS R, DELVENNE P, DEMAN J, BONIVER J, DEFRESNE MP. J Natl Cancer Inst 88 (1996), 824-831. IF...

Read more: Ph. DELVENNE, FNRS Research Director / Chef de service Anatomie pathologique - J. GUIOT, Chef de...

UCLouvain
" www.covidata.be We gather data about the Coronavirus in Belgium, and attempt to extract meaningful information from it. We use open and/or public data to enable these analyses. "
Funding: No funding
Publication References: Work in progress
Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

UMONS - Faculty of Engineering - ILIA and ISIA Departments
" This study allows an early Covid-19 diagnosis by using AI and explainable based classification and detection methods applied to CT and X-ray datasets. Many datasets form several hospitals in Belgium are used. The goal of the project is to use AI based methods to identify Covid-19 patients. Explainable AI methods are used to provide efficient interpretation and visualization tools for the classification and detection results obtained. The second goal of this project is to create a benchmark dataset composed of chest CT and X-ray database related to Covid-19 disease. To this aim, a semi-automatic annotation tool is developed in order to allow fast image annotation by radiologists. - Explainable artificial intelligence applied to Covid-19 detection based on CT and X-ray images. - Annotation tool development to build a benchmark database. "
Funding: University of Mons - Faculty of Engineering
Publication References: ...

Read more: Saïd Mahmoudi, Professor - Thierry Dutoit, Full Professor - Sidi Ahmed Mahmoudi, Professor- Xavier...

UMONS 
" In view of the sanitary context, the UMONS Polytechnic Faculty has decided to replace its annual Créathon with a modified virtual version on the theme of containment. The professors at the origin of the initiative thus decided, in consultation with the academic authorities, to set up an activity whose objective was to enable students to meet (virtually) and to think about how, as engineers and citizens, they could put their skills at the service of society in this particular context. The question addressed to them was the following: "By what brilliant and simple means can we help our fellow citizens to better live the confinement and regain a smille? ». The 21 students who were present thus went through, during 4 hours of team work, the different stages of project creation (ideation, structuring of ideas, action plan of the selected idea and pitch) accompanied by their teachers. This session led to the presentation of 3 project ideas. The proposed solutions address well-known...

Read more: Sébastien Bette, Professor - Santo Raneri, Research and Teaching Assistant

ULB - FNRS
" Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented number of genomic sequences of the causative virus (SARS-CoV-2) have been publicly released. The resulting volume of available genetic data presents a unique opportunity to gain real-time insights into the pandemic, but also a daunting computational hurdle if analysed with gold-standard phylogeographic methods. We here describe and apply an analytical pipeline that is a compromise between fast and rigorous analytical steps. As a proof of concept, we focus on Belgium, one of the countries with the highest spatial density of sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genomes. At the global scale, our analyses confirm the importance of external introduction events in establishing transmission chains in the country. At the country scale, our spatially-explicit phylogeographic analyses highlight an impact of the national lockdown of mid-March on both the long-distance dispersal events and the dispersal velocity of viral lineages. Our...

Read more: Simon Dellicour, FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher

UCLouvain, IRSS 
" How the Covid-19 Pandemic changes the dynamics of meetings and organizations in the Health and Education Sectors? The containment measures deployed following the Covid-19 pandemic produced a partial, if not complete, shift to telework. In many sectors, virtual meetings are now at the heart of work organization and coordination. How do people feel about their virtual meetings? And what do virtual meetings say about our organizations ? To find an answer to these questions, we have distributed a survey within six Belgian universities (University Ghent, University Hasselt, VUB, UCLouvain, ULiège and ULB) and health care services and administrations. "
Funding: none
Publication References: https://www.lecho.be/opinions/carte-blanche/que-penser-des-reunions-virtuelles-qui-se-generalisent/10223471 https://uclouvain.be/fr/decouvrir/coronavirus-que-nous-apprend-la-pratique-des-reunions-virtuelles.html
Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Comment: "Virtual Meetings in the...

Read more: Sophie Thunus, Professor

UMONS and Ambroise-Paré Hospital Mons
" Predictive plasma signature of the clinical behavior of COVID-19 patients. The clinical presentation of COVID-19 infection varies from mild to asymptomatic to pneumonia, which can be complicated by severe respiratory failure and/or cardiovascular, renal, hepatic and cutaneous involvement. The understanding of such a polymorphism is very incomplete and the prognosis is difficult. Several tracks involving inflammatory reactions are currently favored to better explain this disease. In particular, the significant increase in plasma cytokines IL2, IL7, IL10, GSCF, IP10, MCP1, MIP1A and TNFα, known as "cytokine storm", seems to be significantly associated with the ARDS and multi-organ onsets. In this context, IL6 seems to play an important role and targeted treatments against this cytokine seem promising. Also, the infection of endothelial cells by the coronavirus causing endothelium inflammation have been suggested as one of the fundamental...

Read more: Stéphane CARLIER, Prof - Jean-Marie COLET, Prof - Fabrice JOURNE, Dr - Sven SAUSSEZ, Prof- Vincent...

UCLouvain
" The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental representation of social groups : The role of threat on the stereotypes of Chinese in the US and in France "
Funding: UCLouvain and FNRS
Contact: Vincent Yzerbyt, UCLouvain (PSP/IPSY), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Comment: This project comprises two subprojects, one devoted to the change in stereotypes of Chinese in France and one on the facial representation of Chinese in the United States

ULB - FNRS
" On the relationship between isolation, re-opening and mental health, with a special focus on consumerist behaviors. "
Funding: none
Contact: Xavier Noël, Research Associate, FNRS Faculty of Medicine ULB