Hi, I'm Ben
I'm a developer and student studying Mathematics and Computer Science
Currently, I attend the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign as an Edmund James Scholar. I am interested in security, the web, and quantum computers.
tl;dr (you'll miss the cool site): Resume
What I've Done
Positions:
- - August 2021 to Present
- - May 2021 to Auguest 2021
- - January 2021 to May 2021
Personal Projects
- - Summer 2021
- - Fall 2020 to Present
- - Spring 2021
- - Fall 2020
Relevant Coursework
CS 241 - System Programming: Spring 2022
CS 374 - Introduction to Algorithms & Models of Computation: Spring 2022
Math 484 - Nonlinear Programming: Spring 2022
CS 225 - Data Structures: Fall 2021
CS 233 - Computer Architecture: Fall 2021
CS 357 - Numerical Methods 1: Fall 2021
Math 412 - Graph Theory: Fall 2021
Math 415 - Applied Linear Algebra: Spring 2021
ECE 316 - Ethics and Engineering: Spring 2021
Course Associate
During the Spring 2021 Semester I was a Course Associate for CS125: Intro to Computer Science.
- Helped hundreds of individual students one-on-one through video chat and class forum with java concepts and debugging a larger android app in android studio
- Ran office hours section
Course Developer
During the Summer of 2021 I was a Course Developer for CS124/5. I was working in Kotlin utilizing tools including ANTLR and Docker.
- Developed Cyclomatic Complexity Counter for an arbitrary piece of Kotlin Code
- Developed Source Level Code Mutation of Kotlin Code
- Started Development on container execution of arbitrary Code
Head Course Staff
Currently I am a Head Course Associate for CS124: Intro to Computer Science 1.
- Continued normal Course Associate responsibilities
- Administrative duties of running the course calendar
- Helping with the transition from CS125 to CS124
- Helping students in both Kotlin and Java
Summa
Summa was a web app developed by me and a group of friends that took a video url and returned a text summary of it. It then found articles that covered a similar topic. If the video was from YouTube more information about the video would be shown.
The frontend was designed with Figma and built with React and integrated with the backend using Axios. The backend rest API was built with Flask in python and used the YouTube API, News API, and DeepAI API.
Aes-Visualized
I love security, encryption, and cryptography. To learn more about all of them I individually implemented the AES algorithm with a visualization that displayed the steps the algorithm took to turn a given message with a given key into the encrypted version and back again.
This project was developed following the principles of test driven development and completed using C++ with Cinder used for the visualization.
Bots and Automation
I hate doing boring tasks, so I have built a handful of bots and automated many tasks I dislike. I make most of my web bots with Selenium in python.
A few favorite bots that I've made:
- Automatic attendance - automatically filled out an attendance form (so I did not have to get up early)
- Synonym game - looked at a screen, found the current word, used an API to get synonyms, choose the correct synonym from a list
- Did they post? - went to a local government website, checked if a new briefing or post was made, texted me (using Twilio) if one had been
A few favorite automations:
- I hate windows bluetooth - double clicked an icon to autoconnect bluetooth headphones to my computer (instead of clicking 6 times to do so in settings)
- Automated Snapchat Streaks - iPhone mirrored on windows computer, mouse controlled by script to go to snapchat and automatically complete streaks
This Site
In my opinion, this site looks cool. The "cloud" (background) surrounding all the cubes is my favorite part.
This site was made by myself using Vite, Three.js, and quite a bit of Math. The cube sides and all are just regular HTML, Javascript, and CSS. I decided not to use a framework for the practice with native JS.
I would put a picture of the background design or an animation of the background below, but everything looks terrible: jpeg, png, tiff, gif, even avif (the background color, which is solid black, got completely distorted). 24-bit Bitmap (bmp) was good, but it was 20+ MB and I am trying to keep the site size low.