Simon Schellaert

Radio Belgium

I designed, developed and brought to market Radio Belgium, a native app to turn any iOS or Android device instantly into an amazing radio player.

Since launch, the app has been downloaded over 500 000 times with more than 150 000 monthly active users and frequently tops the App Store charts. The app was also featured on popular press sites, such as De Standaard and Humo.

Besides being an interesting project to sharpen my technical skills, it also allowed me to gain hands-on experience in a variety of non-technical fields such as product management, business development and marketing.

Visit website

Tapaway

Inspired by the success of Angry Birds and Cut The Rope, I developed and released my own physics-based puzzle game during high school.

Tapaway was my first foray into iOS development and made use of the Cocos2d game engine, which I integrated with the Box2D physics engine. This combination allowed me to learn the ropes of programming and memory management in Objective-C++.

The end result was an enjoyable game with over 30 handcrafted levels and received great reviews from numerous players. Since this was mainly a learning project, I stopped supporting it when iOS transitioned to 64-bit. A video of the gameplay is still available on YouTube.

Watch demo on YouTube

Master's Thesis on Deep Learning

After completing courses on machine learning, I was excited by its huge potential and decided to do my master’s thesis in this domain.

Specifically, my master’s thesis is titled automatic comic colorization and restoration through deep learning. It is about automatically colorizing degraded black-and-white pages from old comics. To do so, I built upon recent advances in deep learning and generative adversarial networks. Specifically, I proposed a modified network architecture and loss function that leads to more natural results.

Completing this thesis allowed me to immerse myself into recent deep learning research. I also gained a lot of hands-on experience with applying state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to solve challenging problems. You can find my full thesis here or read the paper below.

Read the paper

8-Bit Computer

Due to the various lockdowns in 2020, I had a bit more time on my hands than usual.

One thing that kept me busy was building a programmable 8-bit computer from logic gates, based on Ben Eater’s video series. That series is one of the best explanations of computing and digital electronics I’ve ever seen. Besides, there is something magical about stripping a bunch of wires and turning those into a machine that seems to think.

In the video, you can see my build generating the Fibonacci sequence (on the 7-segment display in the lower right) at a modest 1 KHz. It’s the result of many evenings spent behind an oscilloscope, debugging various software and hardware issues. But it has been incredibly fun and educational, and it made me appreciate the tech we have now even more. I’m currently working on a GPU component to drive a small OLED display.