Ben Bellekens

Worldwide evolutions and events show that monitoring and managing crowds has become crucial. Just think of increasing urbanisation, the rise of mega-events and the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, there is a growing concern for privacy, resulting in ethical debates and, ultimately, appropriate legislation. With our solutions, we can balance both. I launched CrowdScan together with my co-founders as a spin-off company of the University of Antwerp and Imec and we measure and analyze crowds for safety purposes. We don't make use of smartphones or cameras to analyse the crowd size. This technology is capable of monitoring large and small crowds in smart cities, public transportation facilities, and large festivals and in COVID-19 situations to optimize visitor and passenger flows. Furthermore this technology can be used to increase the public safety and security in cities and large events like festivals. What I love to do: - I love to design and develop software systems with respect to KPI's. - I love to challenge myself to adapt to changes. - I get a lot of energy from a system that doesn't crash. - I focus on things that matters (the big elephants ;-) ) - I love to lead and work in a team that thinks two steps ahead. I learned my technical and business skills during my phd and post-doc. The focus of my phd was about how electromagnetic waves can be simulated based on a realistic 2D/3D-model of an environment to optimize localization algorithms. Such a localization algorithm can be tag-based or tag-less based. Within our research group, both kind of algorithms are being researched in terms of accuracy and power consumption. After my phd, i valorised the business case of CrowdScan during my post-doc. I learned my business skills by doing 3 different deep dive courses.