Computer science at the University of Maryland · Army Research Laboratory, summer 2026

benmross.com · LinkedIn · ben@benmross.com · CV

• Herald: an open-source personal agent that runs on your own machine. It reads mail, calendar, messages, location and health into one ledger, and anything another person would see waits for a tap on your phone.
• UMD Loop (University Rover Challenge): the Phase II operator console and mission manager for the team's ROS 2 navigation stack (loop-phase2), and two ways to drive the rover arm with no controller: ARKit on a handheld iPhone, and 3-D hand tracking from two ordinary cameras.
• App Dev Club, Technical Operations: Stripe virtual cards so each subteam can spend from the central budget.
• iOS apps in SwiftUI and Metal: a dining app that sorts UMD menus against food allergies, and a camera that merges bursts of RAW frames to look like a Sony a6400.

• SMCS Kart (gokart-dash): a drive-by-wire electric go-kart, pitched to replace the robotics curriculum at Poolesville High School and taught from as it was built, to a class of 30. All of the firmware: a Teensy 4.1 that owns every motion decision, ESP32 steer-by-wire over CAN, and a React dashboard on a Raspberry Pi that can crash without affecting driving. 40 mph.
• GNSS spoofing detection, Army Research Laboratory: finding where GPS is jammed or spoofed from the position reports ships and aircraft already broadcast, about 100 million a day.
• Chalgen: an agentic harness in which an LLM writes, runs and checks its own cyber forensics challenges. Montgomery College ran its March 2026 competition on it.
• Sparrows: schedules, clubs and announcements for 30+ schools in Montgomery County, about 30,000 monthly users. Lead developer, 2023 to 2026.
• BenGPT: Llama 3.1 8B fine-tuned on five years of my own text messages. My best friend could not reliably tell it from me.
• Planet Falconia: a VR digital twin of a rover mission, built with NIST and accepted at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 Educator's Forum.
• emulsion: film grain generated from math in one WebGL2 shader. Try it.
• PartyPad: phone browsers as motion controllers for Dolphin, signalled through Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects.

Languages    Python · C++ · TypeScript · Java · Swift · SQL · Bash
ML & data    LLM fine-tuning (LLaMA-Factory, Unsloth) · llama.cpp · scikit-learn · pandas · OpenCV
Systems      Linux · Docker · Caddy · Cloudflare Workers · Tailscale · AWS · Vercel
Apps         React · Next.js · React Native · SwiftUI · Stripe · MongoDB · SQLite
Hardware     Teensy · ESP32 · Raspberry Pi · CAN · ROS 2 · LiDAR