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

On July 6th, 2026, I publicly defended my Ph.D. thesis Differentiable Ray Tracing for Radio Propagation (Eertmans, 2026) at UCLouvain.

The presentation was given in French, but the slides are in English.

Slides

The presentation starts with a teaser video with an audio track, see below. For the best experience, enter the presentation in fullscreen and use a headphone!

Most slides have integrated comments (in English), which you can show by entering the speaker mode by pressing S.

Music used for the teaser: Solitude - Felsmann + Tiley Reinterpretation, by M83, Felsmann + Tiley

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.

Recording

The full presentation was recorded on Teams and is available below. Unfortunately, Microsoft Teams doesn’t record the video and audio tracks in high-quality, so apologies for the low FPS and relatively poor sound quality of the video! Moreover, the camera that was supposed to automatically track me during the presentation didn’t do a great job :’-)

The Q&A session and acknowledgments were removed from the recording to only keep the actual presentation.

Teaser

If you are intersted in watching the teaser video only, you can find it below. As for the presentation or slides, it is highly recommended to watch this with a headphone and in fullscreen :-)

Manuscript

When writing my manuscript, I tried to make it as accessible as possible, hence the textbook format. I hope it provides a good, comprehensive introduction to anyone interested in ray tracing applied to radio propagation. If you have any questions or feedback about my work, please feel free to reach out to me!

The permanent link to access my Ph.D. manuscript is https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/278727. If you are interested, you can also order a physical copy of it here: https://pul.uclouvain.be/book/?gcoi=29303100203200. (I do not receive any royalties.)

References

1. Eertmans, J. (2026). Differentiable Ray Tracing for Radio Propagation Modeling [PhD thesis, École polytechnique de Louvain, UCLouvain]. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/278727
2. The Manim Community Developers. (2022). Manim – Mathematical Animation Framework (Version v0.17.2) [Software]. https://www.manim.community/
3. 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/2026-07-06-public-defense/main.py.