EMERGENT: PAVING THE WAY TO A DIGITAL FUTURE

The newest member of the family of entrepreneurial student teams within Technovation Hub is Emergent, Leuven's Data Science and AI students and alumni community. Its vice-president is Lucie Mathieu, third-year bachelor in Electronics & ICT Engineering Technology at Group T Campus. A portrait of a driven role model in a still predominantly male world.

The two students who founded Emergent eight years ago may have been engineers (masters of Engineering Science), but it was by no means their intention to make it an exclusive engineering club. On the contrary, from the outset they wanted to highlight not only the technical but also the commercial and ethical aspects of complex systems. “Emergent's mission is to prepare students for a digital future by stimulating both knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer from experts to students,” explains Lucie. “In the board and management of the teams, you will find students of Statistics, Computer Sciences, Economics and Business Engineering, to name a few, in addition to engineers. This mix is precisely Emergent's greatest asset.”

People manager

Lucie is originally French but she spent the second half of her youth abroad. She went to school in France, Sweden and South Korea. At Seoul Foreign School, she obtained her high school diploma in 2021. The choice of KU Leuven was quickly made. “A highly ranked university with world fame close to the European capital, with an international student community and a fully Englishspeaking engineering programme, what more could you want?”, says Lucie. That same year, she started her first undergraduate year of Engineering Technology at KU Leuven-Group T Campus.

Once in Leuven, Lucie soon got in touch with Emergent. “With a friend, I attended a talk on AI in sport. I found the speaker, but also the organizing team very interesting which enticed me to join Emergent at the next recruitment event. As she applied to become a member, she was also offered the position of HR manager in Team People. The ambitious French student went through the selection procedure flawlessly and became people director in July 2022.”

Wide range

Unlike the Solar Team, Formula Electric Belgium and iGEM, Emergent does not focus on international competitions. “Our mission lies elsewhere,” explains Lucie. “We are convinced that Data Sciences and AI will radically change all aspects of society. Because of digitalisation, little will be as before. We want to prepare students for this with a wide blow of initiatives. These range from talks and workshops by experts, consultancy projects from or in collaboration with companies to career events for those who want to work with data or AI professionally after graduation.”

To realise this offering, six teams operate within Emergent, each with its own directorate. The Team Digital, for instance, deals with online campaigns and content production.

The Consulting Projects Team provides services to companies and chances for students to acquire real world experience. Team Events organises talks, career events and workshops. The Partner Relations Team handles PR, the Team People recruits new members, handles alumni connections and internal activities and Team D4GC is responsible for Emergent Leuven's flagship event: the Data4Good Challenge.

“D4GC is an annual day-long data science competition in which students from different disciplines in groups of four use data to find innovative solutions to real-world social responsibility problems such as urban planning, energy transition, climate change, etc.”, says Lucie. “The 2023 edition brought together 150 students with experts in data science, machine learning, AI and business strategy.”

Doubling

Emergent Leuven's many efforts are paying off. In two years, the number of members has doubled. “It proves what we are on the right track,” says a proud vice-president. “Although growing in itself is not our ultimate goal. First and foremost, we want to be a truly emergent team in the literal sense of the word. That is a team in which the members are so in tune with each other that there is a natural flow in achieving the desired goals. Or -in terms of systems theory- a team whose qualities cannot be reduced to individual members. In short, an organization whose whole is more than the sum of its parts, bringing added value not just to the members bus also to the community”.

This year, the team is focusing on structural reinforcement. After years of growth, they now want to ensure the solidity and longevity of the organization. Having recognized events and establishing themselves as the Data Science and AI organization in Leuven to students and industry, is another one of their focus. However, not all is easy. “An issue we are facing, similarly to many other student organizations in STEM, is the difficulty to attract and recruit women”, says Lucie. “For this we want to ensure we foster a welcoming environment with, for example, the organization of the first Women in Data Science event this year.”

Yves Persoons

 www.emergentleuven.be

 https://dataforgood.be