The insights we have gathered
Over the years, we have experimented with new technologies and in doing so, we have gathered a lot of insights. We want to share them with you. Read our insights on AI, virtual assistants, immersive technology, edge computing, and distributed technology.
All insights
The Generative AI Playground - Part 3: Smarty Party, an AI-powered quiz
After delving into the realms of sports reports and movie assistants, our Generative AI Playground takes another turn. I...
(Over)correcting bias in AI
Last week, Google had some explaining to do after people discovered its Gemini AI tool generated racially diverse Nazis ...
The Generative AI Playground - Part 2: Function Calling Moviebot
The first experiment in our Generative AI Playground was all about turning incomprehensible structured data into captiva...
An interactive and unique experience for De Warmste Week
For De Warmste Week, VRT called on us to produce a highly interactive and unique experience to reward the campaigners.
The Generative AI Playground — Part 1: Automated Soccer Match Report
The rapid advancements in the field of generative AI have truly amazed us over the past year. As AI experts, it was a ch...
Announcement: Oswald's Generative Chatbots
We have all seen the news of large organizations putting their trust in a new GPT-powered chatbot on their website and h...
Data scientists, time to negotiate with your boss! Should you upgrade to Apple’s M2 Pro or Max?
At Brainjar, we are real Apple fans. Most of us use a MacBook Pro, and when Apple released the new MacBooks with upgrade...
Generative AI is magical, but bending the rules will hurt your business
Generative AI is very powerful but could be harmful if deployed wrongly. And while thousands have urged a six-month paus...
Digitizing subsidies and grants at Sint-Niklaas with LB365
The city of Sint-Niklaas has decided to work on digitizing its grants and subsidies to improve its services for its citi...
Using SaaS to annotate our data: applied case and best practices
Data, the backbone of machine learning You can compare machine learning without data to a car without fuel — you won’t g...
Increasing indoor top rope climbing safety with computer vision
While looking for internships, I thought of searching for an AI-based project at De Cronos Groep or even Brainjar specif...
Webflow case - Boosting the visibility of Aviapartner's jobs
Aviapartner was in dire need to make their job opportunities at Brussels Airport more attractive as they wanted to take ...
How to talk with humans? A story about Voice User Interfaces (VUI)
Read how you can improve the user experience of a Voice User Interface (VUI). We talk about conversation flows, user tes...
Get a better and more stable code-base just by applying some of these simple tricks
Some of our thoughts and best practices we're sharing on Clean Code & Good Reviews.
Why you probably shouldn't use REACT.FC to type your components
This post is nuanced, but read it and you might change your opinion about using React.FC. What value does React.FC (or F...
My internship at Wheelhouse in a Fetch - Execute cycle
Landing an internship at the right company isn’t a given in most cases. In this blog, I will share how I experienced the...
Setting up Hot Reloading behind a Reverse Proxy
In a nutshell, Docker Compose allows you to organize multiple containers to work together in a precisely orchestrated ma...
Getting started with accessibility in Angular
Part two of our accessibility series! This time: ensuring you can navigate through your page to all clickable items with...
A guide to more sustainable Machine Learning
The impact of machine learning on the environment. Do you often reflect and think about it? Where does the responsibilit...
Geertrui Mieke De Ketelaere: AI, gut feeling and functional lazy
Geertrui Mieke De Ketelaere makes a particularly energetic impression throughout the interview. And yet she calls hersel...
Code optimization: changing the way you approach repetitive tasks
In this blog, I want to give you some do’s and don’ts pointers when it comes to code optimization. In addition, I explai...
Passion for AI and Big Data - Clusity event summary
A passion for AI and Big Data, that's what everyone in the audience shared on the evening of 10/5. Emilie Nenquin (VRT) ...
Creating a virtual reality nostalgia simulator
You can revisit your neighborhood in its original state just like you remember, using Virtual Reality goggles.
How to choose a Cross-Platform Solution
Choosing the right platform to build on is hard. Choosing a platform for mobile is even harder. In this blog, we elabora...
Discover Apple App Clips: a new way to discover apps
Whatever you want to do nowadays, “there is probably an app for that”. Even though all those apps probably come in handy...
5 tips to improve your code quality while prototyping
If you don't enough measures at the start of the prototyping cyclus, the increase in scope of a prototyping project coul...
Covid test: how Linkedin's algorithm led me to a redesign
While browsing some LinkedIn conversation threads, a suggestion of a newly designed covid test popped up. Let's get into...
How you can help your football club to a #1 place with your smartwatch
“How can we improve fan experience during a sports match?”
React + Ant.design: A perfect match for prototyping your MVP
Want to speed up your idea phase as a React developer to quickly work towards and MVP? Read all about the magic combinat...
Talking Teddy: an intelligent, IoT-driven teddy bear
Talking Teddy is an intelligent, IoT-driven bear that has conversations with children. Afterwards, he performs an analys...
Technology experience, defined
At Craftworkz, we focus on creating human-centered experiences by developing prototypes by using the newest technologies...
Why outlines are essential (and how to use them correctly) - CSS
If you only have used the attribute outlines in CSS to disable them, read this blog on using outlines correctly. It make...
Atomic Design Methodology as a guide to structure design interfaces
Building a web interface can quickly become complex, especially when working on a large project with multiple people. Th...
Brainhouse - Building a web browser for ALS patients
The Brainhouse project's purpose was to put together a diverse squad of interns who would work on a case with social imp...
DIY Progress Bars 📊
As a front-end developer, you’re often confronted with a task that seems too difficult or would take up too much of your...
How writing component tests improved my component cleanliness
At my current assignment, we recently started converting e2e tests to component tests to reduce the...
The state of parking in Leuven (or how we stole 7,5 million euros)
Mister Mayor, we need to talk.
WhatsApp chatbots: things we wish we knew before building
In this case study, we elaborate on the mortierbrigade holiday campaign we worked on and how we built a WhatsApp chatbot...
Discover Nelleke's take on project management and AI
'Next-level drive and dive' is typical for project manager Nelleke Doyen. She puts her talent for 'bringing gusto' in pr...
Leonor's road to data science
After studying veterinary medicine in Portugal and kite surfing in the Philippines, Leonor Drummond retrained as a data ...
Discovering FlutterFlow: the good, the bad, and the ugly
When I discovered FlutterFlow, I was pretty excited but also skeptical. Since I like trying new things, I made an accoun...
Frankenstein would be proud: AI Face Morphing in action!
Why not use some really serious, cool, advanced AI technologies to make something very fun and silly? Well, that is exac...
5 reasons why I think we should all use Notion at work (and at home)
This blog lists several reasons why I think Notion can help you as an individual or even a business. Below, you can find...
Figma: Building a complex component with nested instances and consistent content
Last year, Figma announced a new feature called nested instances, and it was a real game changer! Instead of making vari...
A React Hook to prevent flickering spinners
One of the essential things in building modern web apps is to provide a good user experience. Think of showing a loading...
Storybook: my first impressions
My first introduction to the Storybook library was during a project in which we built a progressive web application. We ...
Eye tracking using webcam images in Tensorflow: my internship story
During my twelve-week-long internship at Brainjar, I created a deep learning model that can perform eye tracking using w...
How to cheat on your internship with mouth animation
While looking for a possible internship, one immediately got my attention. Building a ‘face animation tool’. I couldn’t ...
“Enhance!” - My internship at Brainjar on image enhancing
A story about my time at Brainjar as an intern, where I work on CSI-style image enhance AI including super-resolution, c...
Flutter Web on Google App Engine using Cloud Build
In this blog, we will explain the deployment process to Google App Engine for a Flutter Web application, orchestrated by...
Oswald's 2020 feature wrap-up
2020: a year with a lot of challenges (a global pandemic aside), but also final breakthroughs and solutions. We are read...
A multilingual chatbot, handy in Belgium?
A multilingual chatbot simply speaks several languages for users during a conversation, but is it handy in Belgium?
Stop repeating yourself with Klassif.ai
Brainjar created a terrific software tool to tackle these challenges, which they’ve named Klassif.ai. This platform help...
How to decrease your React CI/CD build time with 50%
We specialize in prototyping applications at a fast pace, which often translated in a “write code, check back later” men...
Why your chatbot's first message is so important - Blog by Oswald.ai
Introducing yourself is the first step in any conversation with a person you have never met before. Why should chatbots ...
How not to waste 4 months in traffic — a strong case for smart traffic lights
Turning Leuven into an accessible and traffic-safe city.
Unforgettable internship at Brainjar: sign language classification
This summer, Brainjar offered me the internship of a lifetime: classifying Dutch Sign Language videos. I had an absolute...
Manual labour, done artificially with Klassif.ai, an IDP platform
Tired of processing thousands of documents manually? Check out our new AI platform, Klassif.ai, and process documents at...
Edge AI for COVID-19: Counting people
We developed an intelligent piece of hardware that counts people going in and out of (public) places without recognizing...
Are you looking for the Otter one? An AR-powered dating app
Dating has not been easy the last few months. We are all locked up in our homes, which means the only opportunity to mee...
Oswald chatbot platform 2019 - feature wrap-up!
A final update about our Oswald chatbot-platform and the new features we created! Includes hybrid cloud, response debugg...
Add value to your chatbot through phone calls
Leverage Twilio’s Media Streams to enable voice interactions with your chatbots.
Prototyping an AI presentation assistant: from idea to solution
Some time ago, we were invited for a meeting with a chemicals group with an interest in AI. We built a tool that uses AI...
Creating an ARCore powered indoor navigation application in Unity
When talking about indoor navigation, we talk about navigation technologies not including GPS, due to its limitations in...
Chatbot building with Oswald's 5 UI / UX best practices
Five Oswald chatbot UI / UX best practices, including: personifying, length, testing, humor and wit.
How to build an event driven application on Google Cloud using cloud functions
Cloud Functions: A simple approach to building an event driven system
How you can detect cracks in concrete bridges using deep learning
Using deep learning methods, we tried to tackle the problem of detecting concrete cracks in bridges. The results exceede...
Integrate your Oswald chatbot with Google Assistant & Google Home
This week, we released an update to Oswald that was all about integrations. Today, I want to guide you through one speci...
Chatbot integrations with Oswald
Today, we're announcing four new integrations in the Oswald platform, bringing us to a total of seven integrations. Let'...
Why you should use AMP together with PWA (for SEO)
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a new keyword in the world of Front End together with PWA (Progressive Web Application...
Robust Real-Time Pose Estimation with OpenPose
As a developer, every once in a while you might come across an application that really makes your heart sing, that makes...
Changing the browser URL without reloading the page
Changing the browser URL without reloading the page. Handy when you want to keep the filters on a web page when the brow...
Falling into AI, and the enablers called PowerAI and Brainjar
Recently, Sam Sterckval joined Brainjar as an AI intern. By combining his background in electrical engineering with his ...
PowerAI, the power painter
A few months ago we made a style transfer application to demo the capabilities of the Genius supercomputer cluster. And ...
An AI-driven, smart billboard for the future
A smart billboard will get your attention and give recommendations about events, promotions, restaurants, sights to visi...
Messing around with OpenAI Gym
OpenAI Gym is a cool platform for anybody involved with reinforcement learning algorithms
Research and use cases on brain computer interfaces (BCI)
At Craftworkz we decided to do some research and protyping with the Emotive Epoc+ mobile headset. We created BCI's to se...
Put your Oswald chatbot to the test
If you have ever configured a chatbot, you know that testing a chatbot can be a tedious and time-consuming job.
“Hi! I’m Oswald and I’ve got some exciting news for you”
Today we added some new features to our Oswald chatbot platform. The biggest change is the introduction of ‘file entitie...
Building chatbots in Hebrew using Oswald
Oswald now supports the Hebrew language for buildings conversational assistants. Want to find out how we implemented thi...
Klassif.ai's Annotator goes Open Source
Klassif.ai is Brainjar’s automation platform for document processing. In this blog post, we will discuss what our journe...
Handwritten text generator with artificial intelligence
As you may know, we have been developing and improving our intelligent document processing platform, Klassif.ai, fo...
How we built the Moving Apart Together app prototype
Have you heard of the Köhler effect? It’s the phenomenon that occurs when a person works harder as a member of a group t...
Oswald is introducing multilingual chatbots, human takeover and much more!
Today we are very excited to introduce a brand-new version of Oswald, available as a free update to all users. We added ...
Design consistency: from chaos to order when designing
Design consistency is a design principle I care about, notice very fast, and get frustrated about all the time. 😅
Creating our unique internal dictionary with a bit of help from our frainds
The TPO DictionaryAs long as TPO Agency has been operational, we’ve agreed with the team that sharing knowledge about ou...
The Generative AI Enigma: The Shocking Truth Behind this Blog Post
It's no secret that AI has become an increasingly important part of our lives. From helping us to perform tasks more eff...
Jira Automation - How I only worked 2 hours in the last 3 weeks
In this blog post, we will show how you can eliminate the annoying manual work of story management in Jira by using the ...
Using React Router v6 to navigate within your React applications
In this blog post we take a look at the new version of React Router to create our navigation implementation for our Reac...
Is your team building products or creating solutions?
From experience, I can tell you that the process of building products is expensive and complex. A common mistake product...
Part-time student, part-time crowdfunding platform developer
As a student worker, TPO Agency presented me with a challenge. They asked me if I could further work on CrowdCollect, my...
Tools4Tools - Episode 2: The migration of Raccoons to Notion and ClickUp
This blog will tell you why and how we migrated all our projects and documentation from other (less favorable) tools to ...
Tools4Tools - E1: ClickUp and our 'aha' moment in Product Management
Next up in Tools4Tools: our 'aha' moment in our Product Management journey. Find out why we started with the ClickUp Com...
My perspective on the retrospective - Product owner insights
To achieve a project or product team's goals, you need a solid group of like-minded people to work together. Finding suc...
How Pandora ruthlessly prioritizes and how our template can help
As product people at TPO Agency, we strive to continuously search for new ways to build the right products efficiently. ...
Tools 4 tools - Episode 0
How we strive to make our daily software work for us and not the other way aroundIt is not always easy to grasp the exte...
NFT marketplaces: the 6 best ones to sell your NFT project
As an artist or organization just getting into NFTs (non-fungible tokens), you might get overwhelmed by the amount of NF...
Holograms: Discovering new ways of communicating
AiR is an app that let's you create realistic holograms, just by using your phone. I've had the pleasure to work alongsi...
Undercover - Eén
What if the main character of your favorite series suddenly reaches out to you?
Comply with regulations with Telly’s mouth mask detection
Edgise developped a facemodel algorithm that can detect mouth masks. This allows store owners to compy with regulations ...
Jurgen Ingels: "We can conquer the world out of Belgium"
Jurgen Ingels wordt wel eens de Vlaamse Elon Musk genoemd, al kende hij die vergelijking zelf nog niet. Jurgen vertelt o...
Powering up your favorite SaaS Tools
Together with Wheelhouse, we built a ‘On-Top-of-SaaS-solution' that started from a SaaS product, AirTable. To tailor to ...
Discovering what's new at Watson Developer Conference 2016
In 2016, IBM hosted the "Watson Developer Conference" in the San Francisco Bay area. Craftworkz attented the event to di...
Solid: Go with the flow
So far, I’ve written a few blogs about Solid. You should know how to set up a pod, or how linked data works. However, I ...
Forget the struggle of picking the right bra size
Shopping online has never been easier - Van de Velde
Ordering movie theater tickets via Messenger
No more questions about movies: Kinepolis and Craftworkz launch chatbot Bert with Oswald chatbot technology.
Bringing the Christmas spirit to the airport
Brussels Airport has a new little Christmas helper named BRUce.
Lot number detection
An application for finding the lot number on a box with computer vision.
A job fair turns into an AR job hunting game.
SD Worx - Get to know your future employees by asking them questions via a hunt and reward them with an awesome AR exper...
Kate, your personal digital assistant
Kate provides customers with unparalleled ease of use by simplifying a number of daily routines, and integrating seamles...
So, linked data, you say?
In my previous blog, I explained how to set up your own Solid pod server. Now that we have a place to store our data, we...
Let's get Edgy with the new Google Coral Edge TPU USB Accelerator
A few days ago, we got our Google Coral Edge TPU dropped into the mail. This is a USB accelerator to run TensorFlow lite...
NVIDIA Jetson Nano, a Raspberry Pi on steroids, first thoughts and tests
Brainjar's Sam Sterckval gives his thoughts, and finds his way through the first steps with the all new NVIDIA Jetson Na...
Performance comparison : Coral Edge TPU vs Jetson Nano
A quick and dirty comparison between the new Google Coral Edge TPU and NVIDIA Jetson Nano with a little deep dive into t...
Edge AI combined with Agile means project success!
Edge AI projects that follow an Agile Methodology have a significant higher success rate. In this blog we reveal why and...
Why a prototyping company uses Design Sprints
A Design Sprint is a five day process for solving critical business questions with the help of five phases. Each phase i...
Making my Case for “One Attribute, One Line” in HTML
We are making the case for One Attribute, One Line. Next time you decide to crumple up an HTML tag into a single line of...
Welcome TheLedger: new kids on the blockchain
Today, we are proud to introduce a new, sixth company in the Raccoons group: TheLedger: providing blockchain services in...
A gentle introduction to Quantum Computing
Since evangelization on the possibilities of quantum computing is a large part of our mission statement, we decided it w...
Intelligent automation: when RPA meets Artificial Intelligence
During our masterclass "cognitive RPA" we demonstrate the possibilities of combining artificial intelligence (AI) and ro...
QNTM: Entering the era of Quantum Computing
Raccoons is very proud to present a brand new initiative: QNTM. Yes, today we are taking our very first steps — carefull...
Introducing Raccoons!
20 december we introduced the Raccoons group to the public. Raccoons is the innovation group containing ventures such as...
Why prototyping will save you time and money
Prototyping is excellent to bring an idea into the real world. Little time is needed and at a fraction of the cost conce...
Introducing Oswald
Today we are very proud and excited to officially launch Oswald, a powerful all-in-one chatbot platform for agencies and...
Teamwork improves the development lifecycle of software
Teamwork is a process that takes time to evolve and mature within a team. In this blogpost we explain how we handle vari...
Op 2 weken een edge-AI telpaal met Google Coral, AWS & Raspberry Pi
Telly is een 3D-geprinte telpaal die edge-computing en AI combineert om aan image recognition te doen. Zo kunnen we mens...
The SOLID Project - How to set up a basic SOLID pod server
How to set up a basic SOLID pod server
Unleashing the Genius supercomputer
Some time ago we got word that KU Leuven ICTS was looking for an application to demo the AI capabilities of their new GP...
Supernova 2018: On invisibility and flying cars
Craftworkz had a booth at the Supernova Tech Fair, a “one-of-a-kind event where visionary solutions, technologies and in...
Google Cloud Next ’18 London — It’s serverless all the way
On October 10–11 2018, we were invited to Google Cloud Next ’18 in London to find out what’s next for Google Cloud Platf...