Hi, I'm Ben 👋

I'm a recent Computer Science Master's graduate from Penn State, who loves programming and puzzles and is planning to turn it into a career. I'm particularly interested in Algorithms and AI (especially AI security!), but also have done some work with graphics and compilers. I graduated May 2024 with my Master's and am now looking for full-time Software Engineering, Quantitative Trading, or AI Researcher jobs. If you are interested in collaborating with me or have any questions, you're more than welcome to reach out to me on Linkedin or via email (zydney.biz11@gmail.com).

Recent projects

Work Experience

Penn State: Introduction to OOP and Data Structures

Head Learning Assistant (June 2021 - May 2024)

As the lead Learning Assistant for a class of 600 students, I:

  • Collaborated closely with the professor to design engaging course content
    • Developed over 30 new, original, programming projects to enhance the curriculum
    • Crafted exam questions to test critical understanding of the material
  • Created and delivered presentations on complex data structures topics
  • Led lectures, recitations, and provided one-on-one support during office hours
  • Independently organized and ran the class's main extra credit opportunity - a code golf challenge

Dr. Tina Lasisi Research Lab

Research Assistant (August 2021 - December 2023)

In Dr. Lasisi's anthropology research lab, I:

  • Led the redesign of Fibermorph, a program for analyzing microscopic hair images:
    • Improved performance by over 100 times
    • Added capabilities to handle overlapping hairs
  • Contributed to multiple research papers on computational approaches to anthropological issues
  • Performed data analysis in R and Excel, creating insightful visualizations
  • Bridged anthropological and computational perspectives in interdisciplinary meetings at Yale
  • Spearheaded the lab's transition to a Notion database, enhancing organization and workflow efficiency

Activities

ICPC (Competitive Programming)

I participated in my university's ICPC team while in college. In 2024, we advanced to the North American Championship for the first time in our school's history after I solved an interesting problem on finite automata in the last few minutes to beat out some schools like Harvard and Carnegie Mellon.

Through studying for ICPC I learned lots of advanced data structures and algorithms, but more importantly got significant practice with very difficult problem solving and debugging, particularly when working with a team.

Code Golf

I'm very good at "Code Golf", where you write programs with the goal of them being as short as possible. In addition to running a Code Golf competition at my university, I like to compete on code.golf, where I own a couple first place solutions on long-standing problems in Python (out of ~300 people who tried, no one has been able to get a solution as short as mine). If you're reading this, I encourage you to give it a try!

Another great place to see this kind of code is with Advent of Code. This is a month-long event in December every year with a programming puzzle each day. As an unofficial challenge, a group of people like to collaboratively golf these problems to the shortest code they can. I contributed extensively to these solutions last year, being the final improvement on many of them. You can find them all here.

Science Olympiad

As a founding member of Penn State's Science Olympiad organization, I helped plan and host a national science tournament for high school students. We launched with an online event during the Covid pandemic and transitioned to an in-person tournament in subsequent years.

The event grew to host over 600 students from 10 states, and our team at Penn State grew from 4 founding members to well over 30. My roles included designing the website, serving as Treasurer, and planning and running all pre-awards activities. This experience honed my skills in large-scale event management, clear communication across diverse groups, and leadership.

PSU Engineering Teaching & Research Experiences

At Penn State, I was selected for UTREE (Undergraduate Teaching and Research Experiences in Engineering) through technical speaking contest all Engineering students participated in. As a UTREE member, I:

  • Participated in various technical development projects
  • Mentored top engineering students on refining communication skills
  • Planned and organized future speaking contests
  • Delivered a presentation to students at McMaster University competing in the North American EcoCar championship
This experience enhanced my technical communication skills, mentorship abilities, and project management capabilities.