Ben's Blog

New York based roboticist and machine learning engineer, with experience at Tesla AI, FAIR, Google Research and Amazon. Interested in self-supervised learning and fast neural network inference. Check out my blog, Github, Google Scholar, LinkedIn or shoot me an email.

Work History

K-Scale Labs

• January 2024 - present
• Founded a company to move humanity up the Kardashev scale

Meta AI

• New York, October 2022 to May 2023
• Research engineer, working on open-ended real-world robotics
• Left to explore startup ideas

Tesla Autonomous AI

• Palo Alto, March 2021 to May 2022
• Machine learning engineer, working on AI for perception
• Wrote ray casting CUDA kernel for producing ground truth data for a core geometry prediction model
• Got a language model to drive a car
  • Designed and trained car-compatible autoregressive model architecture
  • Rewrote network compiler stack to support subroutine capture and control flow

Facebook AI

• Seattle, May 2018 to February 2021
• Research engineer, worked on representation learning for speech. Coauthored multiple high-impact papers (available through my Google Scholar page)

Facebook, Care Machine Learning (Intern)

• Seattle, Summer 2017
• Built tools for automatically evaluating and deploying objectionable content classifiers
• Tripled model refresh rate and eliminated several hours of manual work per refresh

Google Research, Handwriting Recognition (Intern)

• Mountain View, Fall 2016
• Improved mixed-script TensorFlow-based online handwriting recognition system for Chinese-English and Devanagari-English language pairs
• Trained a Generative Adversarial Network for producing handwriting using recurrent neural networks with attention components

Amazon, India Invoicing (Intern)

• Seattle, Summer 2016
• Build three APIs for interacting with the existing India invoicing service
• Build a web framework for helping product managers answer customer questions and solve bugs
• Diagnosed and fixed a Sev 2 which affected millions of dollars in transactions

Education

Emory University, BS in Mathematics and Computer Science

• Class of 2017
• 3.9 GPA
• Graduate-level coursework in deep learning, information retrieval, compilers, operating systems, computational neuroscience
• Additional coursework in economics, Chinese language, theater
• ACM ICPC
  • 1st Place, Division 2 (2017)
  • 2nd Place, Division 2 (2016)
• Dean’s Achievement Scholarship (2014 - 2017) Highest undergraduate merit award
• Computational Neuroscience Training Grant (2014 - 2016) Highly competitive NIH Blueprint Grant for studying computational neuroscience at Emory and Georgia Tech

Additional

• Personal Github projects and gists have accumulated over 1000 stars
• TSA PreCheck (2018 - Present) Highest civilian honor awarded by the United States Transportation Security Administration