Governments and industry aim at creating a Smart Society through further computerization. With its specific calls for public-private partnerships (PPPs), Europe is also responding to this trend in order to smarten up public infrastructure and corresponding business processes, and this thanks to a better integration of internet technology. Consequently, growth markets should adapt themselves in the area of energy management (e.g. smart power grids), mobility and logistics (e.g. multimodal routing and Intelligent Transport Systems), health care (in particular eHealth) and smart living (e.g. smart buildings). This trend is also confirmed by the growing number of requests for cooperation the research groups for internet technology receive from Flemish and European industry.

FUSION, the multidisciplinary consortium of the Association Ghent University, bundles expertise in internet technology with savoir-faire in the four subfields of Smart Society mentioned above. Research groups from the faculties Engineering, Science, Medicine and Health Sciences, Psychology and Pedagogy are actively involved.

The consortium contributes substantially to the reinforcement of the economic structure in Flanders. FUSION is developing the cooperation on Flemish and European level through projects in which the knowledge of the consortium is valorized and the industry positions itself on the international market, and through developing unique testing facilities and technology platforms that form a leverage to industrial cooperation with the possibility to broad valorization, etc.