Your phone isthe controller.
PartyPad turns up to four phone browsers into controllers for Dolphin—no app or per-player setup. It bridges touch, motion, and IR input over local networks or secure online sessions, with experimental RetroArch support.
AVAILABLE FOR INTERESTING WORK
DEVELOPER + BUILDERPOOLESVILLE, MD · ET
SOFTWARE WITHA PULSE.SYSTEMS WITHA PURPOSE.✦
01 / SELECTED WORKProjects that left
Projects that left
the lab.
A few things I’ve researched, designed, programmed, broken, and rebuilt.
Teaching machinesto sound human.
Fine-tuning Llama 3.1 on a deeply personal dataset, then iterating in the cloud with TensorFlow and CUDA to explore where imitation becomes identity.
A blimp thatfinds its own way.
A custom-designed, 3D-printed gondola with Raspberry Pi control, wireless sockets, motors, and an OpenCV pipeline for autonomous waypoint detection.
04Exoplanets,made tangible.
Presented at Johns Hopkins University’s XR Symposium on using ParaView and virtual reality to help students understand model exoplanets through rover design.
05A storefront fora sweeter cause.
A performant full-stack platform for Pop for a Cause, pairing an expressive public site with a MongoDB-backed admin system and Stripe donations.
02 / MORE FROM THE BENCHSide quests &
Side quests &
experiments.
Personal LLM Assistant
A self-hosted n8n + Ollama agent wired into Spotify and Notion.
Home Media Server
A Docker media stack tuned to run on a resource-constrained Raspberry Pi 3B+.
Mental Health App
Core programmer on a student team building a React Native tool for high schools.
Exoplanet Rover
Lead programmer for navigation, sample collection, and vision on variable terrain.
Gene Data in R
Scalable visualizations of genome-wide association study data, built for the classroom.
Room Reservations
A full-stack scheduling system designed and delivered for a school administrator.
03 / THE HUMANCURIOUS BY
CURIOUS BY
DEFAULT.
I like projects where the answer isn’t already sitting in a tutorial.
I’m an incoming computer science freshman at the University of Maryland, drawn to AI, cyber forensics, self-hosting, robotics, and the satisfying moment when an abstract idea starts doing something useful in the real world.
That has meant everything from training language models and building agents to 3D-printing an autonomous blimp gondola and presenting XR research at Johns Hopkins.
READ THE FULL CV
BEN ROSS — INCOMING COMPUTER SCIENCE FRESHMAN AT UMDHAVE A HARD PROBLEM, A STRANGE IDEA,
OR SOMETHING WORTH BUILDING?