Francois Geldenhuys

I did a 4 year computer science degree at the University of Pretoria. I was especially interested in the Artificial Intelligence courses and did related year projects in both final year of CS and in honours year.

Developed a 3D swarm robot simulator as 3rd year project. This had a full client/server architecture, used the ODE library for 3D physics and dynamics, Irrlight for 3D graphics, and supported plugins in C++. It could also control physical Mindstorm Lego robots, and simulate obstacles and environments for these. The project was done with support from the CIRG research group, and won the IBM Open Source prize in 2004.

My honours year project was designing and evaluating a new Ant Colony Optimisation algorithm that worked in real space. It was first implemented and refined in 2D space, and then used in a full 3D simulation. It was done under supervision of Prof. Andries Engelbrecht in the CIRG research group.

I designed and wrote the marking logic and various other pieces of an auto code marking system we used in course practicals at the university. It is still used today and many CS graduates still know this system. It was written in Ruby and C, and can safely compile and execute C++ code submitted to the server. It then marks the output using XML specifications.

Co-presented C for Engineers to first and second year engineering students in the first semester. I was responsible for half the lectures and running all practicals. In the second semester I assisted with the Data Structures in C++ course presented by Prof Andries Engelbrecht. I was responsible for all the practicals, and for lectures when the Professor was unavailable. During this time I also started working on an MSc, doing research into co-evolution of neural network controllers for robotic navigation, using ensembles of neural networks in layered and subsumption architectures.

This company had an in-house developed mass data storage and application engine, and I worked on the backend, which was mostly in C++. This was used to process large amounts of data such as CAT scans, and used for other medical solutions. Amongst other things I worked on the Apache plugin and wrote a full remote debugging IDE.

I had my first commercial experience with mobile development here, when I wrote the mobile app for Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presedential campaign. It was done using J2ME, and you could track his campaign progress, donate money and so on.

I was later moved to an Innovation Fund startup project called Integrated Pricing Solutions. Their product was a robotic electro-mechanical price labeling system. I worked on the software running on a Linux powered handheld device (before the days of Android), and embedded C on the firmware running on the robot. I also helped design the electronics and did hardware prototyping. My biggest job was implementing one-to-many infrared communication from scratch. The solution had to be low latency, very low power consumption, and be able to run under the constraints of a tiny PIC24 microprocessor.

Implemented targetting algorithms for the Umbani project, involving image processing and 3D spacial positioning. I also worked on flight simulation software used for pilot training, and parts of the the navigation system of the Raptor project.

Here was the first time I developed for Android, writing an app for law enforcement and security companies that could recognise number plates using a phone's camera.

I started a software company and did a wide range of work, from websites to embedded programming for 3G connected access control systems. At it's biggest it had one permanent employee, and I used a few contractors.

The old Innovation Fund was now incorporated into TIA, and the price label project contacted me again, this time to do the server backend and frontend work, and general technical consulting about the project.

By far the most work was for IT School Innovation and their Integrated Education Platform. I did all the Android development, as well as server backend. We worked with Ericsson to install educational software into poor rural schools, and many private schools now use the system.

After PSG invested in IT School Innovation, I changed to being a full time employee, as I was already exclusively doing work for them. The development team size has more than doubled, and I gained a lot of experience in working with a larger team.

IT Schools' solution supports 3 different mobile platforms, as well as the web, and the Android application alone is used by over 100 000 users. The application supports both EPUB and PDF books - encrypted and automatically distributed, annotations in most media types, highlighting, printing, summary generation etc.