Private Ph.D. Defense - Differentiable Ray Tracing for Radio Propagation

On May 5th, 2026, I defended my Ph.D. thesis Differentiable Ray Tracing for Radio Propagation at UCLouvain, in front of my jury members:

• Prof. Laurent Jacques (supervisor, Université catholique de Louvain);
• Prof. Claude Oestges (supervisor, Université catholique de Louvain);
• Prof. Christophe Craeye (chairman, Université catholique de Louvain);
• Prof. Christophe De Vleeschouwer (secretary, Université catholique de Louvain);
• Prof. Philippe De Doncker (Université Libre de Bruxelles);
• Prof. Enrico Maria Vitucci (Università di Bologna);
• and Dr. Jakob Hoydis (NVIDIA).

At UCLouvain, Ph.D. defenses are in two parts. The first part is private, in which the candidate presents their work to the jury members only. This part lasts several hours, including the question-and-answer session. If the jury is satisfied with the work, the candidate is invited to perform the public defense, which is usually less technical and targets a wider audience (i.e., colleagues, friends, and family). The slides presented during the private defense are available below. The slides for the public defense, as well as the video recording and thesis document, will be made available in due time.

Slides

The following slides are made with RevealJS and are interactive!

Use basic keys like LEFT and RIGHT to navigate through slides, or F to go full screen; you can also click on S to enter the speaker view, which shows the current slide, the next slide, and the speaker notes. For more keyboard shortcuts, see the RevealJS documentation.

The slides were generated using the Manim (The Manim Community Developers, 2022) animation engine and Manim Slides (Eertmans, 2023), one of my open source projects, to combine the animations into slides and later convert them to a RevealJS .html file.

If you prefer, a PDF versions is also available. No PowerPoint version is available as it would be too large for GitHub.

References

1. The Manim Community Developers. (2022). Manim – Mathematical Animation Framework (Version v0.17.2) [Software]. https://www.manim.community/
2. Eertmans, J. (2023). Manim Slides: A Python package for presenting Manim content anywhere. Journal of Open Source Education, 6(66), 206. https://doi.org/10.21105/jose.00206

Source code

Available on GitHub: _slides/2026-05-05-private-defense/main.py.