Your cart is currently empty!
Holst Centre’s vision more current than ever
The Holst Centre pulled out all the stops on 14 April in Amsterdam to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Employees, partners and other invitees flocked to the Kromhouthal on the IJ river to look back on a decade of research and development. The ideas that underpinned the institute’s founding back then are more current than ever. Yet it will be a major challenge in the centre’s second decade to ensure that the Netherlands reaps the economic benefits of the centre’s accumulated knowledge and expertise.
Autonomous sensor networks were an exotic what-if when the Holst Centre was founded in 2006. Though most people had been carrying around a mobile phone for years, it was a clunky and expensive way to access the internet. Not until the launch of the Iphone in 2007 did mankind definitively enter the connected age. And gradually, it started to seem reasonable that man’s environment would follow him into the web.
Back then, we hadn’t yet heard the term we now use for that, the Internet of Things (IoT), but Imec’s vision – which underpins half of the Holst Centre – still stands proud and tall. The IoT is viewed as one of the major forces that will drive the evolution of electronics in the coming years.