He has been working at the University of Louvain for 36 years, including 10 years as Director of the General Information Systems Department, and therefore knows better than anyone how the digital transformation has come to play an increasingly prominent role in recent decades.
This is the leading university in French-speaking Belgium, with 40,000 students and 8,000 staff, and an IT infrastructure comprising 1,500 virtual servers and 2,000 Wi-Fi hotspots capable of handling up to 70,000 simultaneous connections. The IT team comprises 150 IT specialists.
Jean-Luc Martou’s strategy centres on motivating and retaining talent, reducing dependence on Microsoft, adopting open source and the pragmatic integration of AI. His key projects include the SAP merger and migration, the development of the OSIS student management system, the launch of a student mobile app, and the creation of a sovereign AI (Piccolo) for learning.
The new mobile app for students was developed in-house after a solution from an external supplier failed to deliver the desired results. It comprises the digital student card, the personal timetable, access to Moodle (LMS), booking of sports activities and library visitor numbers. The app was launched this year and 30,000 of the 40,000 students have downloaded it.
The Piccolo project, initiated by Professor Yves Deville, was developed in-house; it utilizes the APIs of the French AI company Mistral, while also running on the university’s own servers for confidential projects. It includes ‘virtual coaches’ for specific subjects (economics, theology, medicine) based on lecture notes, reference works and sources validated by lecturers. No ‘hallucinations’, with a requirement to acknowledge the system’s limitations. Patient simulations are used to practise taking medical histories. Planned scale-up: from 25 to 150 virtual coaches by February 2027.
There is also a Low-Code and AI Development initiative in which Outsystems has been engaged to accelerate development. In a benchmark, low-code was able to complete the task in 5 days compared to 35 days in Java. Around 35 applications have been developed in this way in recent years. An AI study is also underway focusing on Cloud Code to generate code, with verification and testing assisted by other AI systems.
Jean-Luc Martou is not only a passionate IT leader, he is also the scenarist of some 25 comic books and a board member of the Belgian Centre for the Comic Strip. Imagination reigns!
