Learning Bytes Festival is a one-day experience full of thought-provoking ‘learning bites’ aimed at inspiring you for the digital transformation of your L&D, HR, and talent development strategy.
It is an initiative from imec and Edtech Station, and its current, 5th edition takes place at HRTech Unfolded.
The festival showcases the latest insights from digital learning, AI, and workplace innovation, bringing together researchers, innovators, and practitioners to explore how people and organisations learn in a rapidly changing world.
10:30 – 10:35
Main Room
WELCOME TO LEARNING BYTES FESTIVAL 2026
Frederik Cornillie
Research and valorization manager at imec & KU Leuven
Frederik Cornillie (Ph.D., KU Leuven) is research and valorization manager at Itec, an interdisciplinary research group of KU Leuven and the strategic research institute imec in Belgium. Deeply passionate about research-based innovation in technologies for education, training, and learning, Frederik has spent over two decades bridging the gap between academic insights and real-world educational tools. He works at the forefront of the EdTech ecosystem in Flanders, championing effective collaboration models between researchers, startups, and organizations. He is dedicated to ensuring that as AI and emerging technologies reshape the future of work, the tools we build are scientifically grounded, scalable, and deeply human-centered. Frederik is heavily involved in imec’s strategic research programme on AI-driven education and training, in the EdTech-focused research in the Flanders AI Research programme, and in the incubation and strategy formation of EdTech Station. In 2022, he initiated Learning Bytes Festival and has been the driving force behind its scientific programme since then.
Frederik Cornillie
Join us for the official opening of this year’s Learning Bytes Festival as our hosts, Frederik Cornillie and Thomas Van Cauwenberghe, welcome you and guide you through a day filled with inspiring keynotes, engaging sessions and valuable opportunities to connect with fellow learning professionals.
10:35 – 11:10
Main Room
Opening keynote
Stijn Van Laer
Operational by design: What high-stakes environments teach us about learning and development
Stijn holds a PhD in Instructional Psychology and Pedagogy from KU Leuven. Over the past decade, he has designed and managed learning systems in environments where getting it wrong carries real consequences. At Mastercard, leading learning strategy for a global customer education academy across markets and jurisdictions; at NATO, heading the Learning Technologies Section and serving as Deputy Branch Head for Modelling, Simulation, and Learning Technologies; and now at ESHRE, overseeing education, certification, and accreditation for reproductive healthcare specialists across Europe and beyond. Three very different worlds. One conviction: learning and development only works when it is designed into operations, not just an afterthought.
Stijn Van Laer
Operational by design: What high-stakes environments teach us about learning and development
What if the biggest risk to our organisations isn’t whether our people are trained, but whether we are ready when it matters most?
Continued globalisation, artificial intelligence, geopolitical volatility, and accelerating skills obsolescence have further eroded the distance between training and performance. Yet many organizations still treat learning as a scheduled event rather than an operational necessity. In critical environments, this gap isn’t a pedagogical inconvenience, it’s a strategic liability. So what can a military alliance, a fintech, and a medical credentialing body teach us about closing it?
This keynote draws on experiences from three very different operational contexts and the research that supports them to answer those questions and surface one shared design principle: the organisations that perform best when it matters aren’t the ones with the best learning management system or content. They are the ones that have built learning into the architecture of how they operate.
You will leave this talk with concrete principles to bring back to your team, and sharper questions about your own organisation to take the thinking further.
11:10 – 11:35
Main Room
Research talk
Niko Verhaegen
From training to competency intelligence: how AI and XR transform workforce development in the semiconductor industry
Niko Verhaegen is an XR & AI innovation lead specializing in the future of workforce learning. Teaching and knowledge sharing have always been in his DNA, and for more than 25 years he has helped organizations transform the way people learn. At imec, he leads the development of XR programs that transform technical training into data-driven competency development. His human-centred vision keeps AI in the loop. Previously, he introduced VR learning on a global scale at GF Piping Systems.
Niko Verhaegen
Brian G. Booth
From training to competency intelligence: how AI and XR transform workforce development in the semiconductor industry
Brian G. Booth is a senior researcher in the imec image processing and interpretation lab, an embedded imec research group at Ghent University. He received a Ph.D. in computing science from Simon Fraser University before joining imec in 2016. He became a Marie Curie fellow in 2017 for his research in plantar pressure imaging. His current research focuses on industrial computer vision, specifically the challenges that arise when taking computer vision concepts from the lab to the real world. These challenges include vision-based understanding of the environment, like that of a trainee at a company, to improve user-machine interactions.
Brian G. Booth
From training to competency intelligence: how AI and XR transform workforce development in the semiconductor industry
The way we train people on-the-job has hardly changed in decades, yet the complexity of today’s workplace continues to grow. Companies are no longer challenged to just train people faster, but to understand how they learn, where they struggle, how to preserve critical knowledge, and how to continuously develop competencies while putting employees and trainers in the centre. Many industries are impacted by these trends, in particular high-tech sectors like advanced manufacturing, pharmaceutical engineering, and the semiconductor industry
In this session, we will show how imec’s strategic research programme on learning and training is laying the foundations of future workforce development in the semiconductor industry and beyond. It combines XR, AI and state-of-the-art sensing techniques to shed light on learning behaviour of engineers in training and capture tacit knowledge of experts with a view to developing a future-proof workforce in high-tech industries. We show how training in imec’s cleanroom is being transformed by adaptive educational technologies and competency assessment grounded in learning science, and how we are building new systems to preserve tacit knowledge of experts in order to make it available whenever and wherever it is needed. Our research will inspire you to help your organization reduce knowledge loss, accelerate onboarding and improve resilience against workforce turnover.
11:35 – 12:00
Main Room
Industry talk
Kathleen Heireman
Human(e) communication in the age of chatbots
Kathleen Heireman is Country Lead Belgium at Learnlight and has over 20 years of experience in corporate language learning and communication. Following the successful integration of BLCC into Learnlight, she now leads the Belgian business while helping organizations rethink how language, intercultural communication, and human skills contribute to business performance. A strong advocate for innovation in Learning & Development, Kathleen combines local market expertise with a global perspective. She is passionate about demonstrating how personalized learning, technology, and human connection can help organizations build more inclusive, collaborative, and high-performing international teams.
Kathleen Heireman
Human(e) communication in the age of chatbots
More information coming soon
13:30 – 13:55
Main Room
Panel discussion
13:55 – 14:20
Main Room
Research talk
Klaas Bombeke
Adaptive cognitive load assessment in healthcare training and beyond
Klaas Bombeke has a background in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience research and is a senior researcher at the imec-mict-UGent research group and operational manager of the imec-affiliated EMU Lab (www.emulab.eu). In his research, he brings together methods and theories from engineering, psychology, neuroscience, and communication sciences to study, create, and improve human-technology interactions. His work focuses primarily on the design of electronic and digital products, with particular attention to psychophysiology, (neuro)ergonomics, objective and implicit measures of user experience, and psychological phenomena such as stress, mental effort, attention, and other cognitive-affective states. In December 2024, he co-founded the spin-off ‘Spatial Dynamics’ together with colleagues, an initiative of imec, Ghent University, and Howest, where they build generic VR-based assessments for the workforce of tomorrow (www.spatialdynamics.eu). There, he is currently mainly involved in developing competence measurements based on behavioral data captured in VR1.
Klaas Bombeke
Adaptive cognitive load assessment in healthcare training and beyond
Timing is everything in training: support that comes too early interrupts productive struggle and breeds over-reliance, while support that comes too late leads to frustration and disengagement. Yet most training systems today are blind to the learner’s internal state: they only see errors and completion times, long after the optimal moment for intervention has passed. In high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where professionals must learn complex procedures under pressure, this inability to sense when a learner is struggling (but not yet asking for help) represents a major missed opportunity for both learning efficiency and patient safety. In this session, I will show how immersive technologies like VR, combined with multimodal behavioral and physiological sensing, allow us to assess cognitive load and anticipate learner needs in real time. Drawing on recent research from our lab, I will demonstrate how subtle nonverbal signals — gaze patterns, head movements, and hand kinematics — can predict that a trainee is about to seek help several seconds before they actually ask, and how machine learning models trained on human delegation decisions can determine when to increase or decrease assistance, bridging the gap between adaptive (system-controlled) and adaptable (user-controlled) support.
14:00- 14:30
Breakoutroom: Data & Performance Management
Research talk
Interoperability for skills management
More information coming soon.
14:20 – 14:55
Main Room
Closing keynote
Bien Vanderstappen
Bien Vanderstappen is CEO and co-founder of TEO, a scale-up that helps the manufacturing industry discover, develop, and retain technical talent. Driven by her belief that the shortage of technical profiles cannot be solved simply by searching for talent, but by creating it, she is building innovative solutions at TEO for upskilling, assessments, and knowledge retention on the work floor.
With more than ten years of experience in recruitment and talent development, Bien combines a strong professional background with a deep passion for education, technology, and industrial innovation. She challenges organisations to look beyond CVs and diplomas and focus on people’s potential to grow. This vision is the common thread running through both her entrepreneurship and TEO’s mission.
As a speaker and entrepreneur, she inspires organisations to stop viewing talent development solely as an HR challenge and instead recognise it as a key driver of sustainable growth and competitiveness.
Bien Vanderstappen
More information coming soon
14:55 – 15:00
Main Room