Ben Ross

Computer science, University of Maryland, class of 2029.

Research apprentice, Army Research Laboratory, summer 2026.

2026 to nowAuthorPython, SQLite, Claude Code, Codex

An open-source personal agent that runs on your own machine. It reads mail, calendar, messages, location and health into one ledger. Anything another person would see waits for a tap on your phone.

151kfacts in its ledger
13sources
MITlicense

2025 to 2026Co-lead, with one classmateC++, PlatformIO, CAN, React, TypeScript

A drive-by-wire electric go-kart, pitched to replace the robotics curriculum at Poolesville High School and taught from as it was built.

40 mphtop speed
40 hppeak motor power
72 Vdrivetrain
The kart at night, its frame lit red by LED strips
The dashboard running on the kart, mounted under the steering wheel
The kart dashboard: speed gauge and map
Dashboard, React on a Raspberry Pi
Render of the custom mainboard
Custom mainboard
Close-up of mainboard connectors
Power, CAN, LEDs

2023 to 2024SoloLlama 3.1, TensorFlow, CUDA, Google Cloud

Llama 3.1 fine-tuned on five years of my own text messages. My best friend could not reliably tell it from me.

2023 to 2026Lead developerNext.js, TypeScript, MongoDB, AWS Amplify, Gemini

A dashboard for every school in the county: schedules, clubs and announcements, in English and Spanish. It ran on every classroom TV at Poolesville. Handed off in 2026.

30+schools
~30kmonthly users
MCPSofficial partner
Poolesville · Dashboard
Sparrows dashboard for Poolesville High School: the period countdown and the day's bell schedule
Schedule explorer
Schedule explorer: a calendar picking the bell schedule for any date
Clubs
Clubs directory for Poolesville High School
Opportunities
Opportunities: internships and scholarships matched to students
The Sparrows landing page on a phone

Summer 2026Research apprentice, Army Research LaboratoryPython, ADS-B, AIS, DBSCAN

Finding where GPS is being spoofed, using the position reports ships and aircraft already broadcast.

2023 to 2026Student researcher, with NISTVR, OpenCV, ParaView, LiDAR

A rover mission on a simulated planet, turned into a digital twin you can walk through in VR. First high school students to speak at the Johns Hopkins APL XR Symposium.

SIGGRAPH Asia2026 Educator's Forum, accepted
JHU APLXR Symposium, 2025
Ben speaking at the Johns Hopkins APL XR Symposium, July 2025
The physical terrain table from above: craters, a lava tube, dunes and a stream bed
Photogrammetry scan of the Raspberry Pi rover
Overhead camera feed with AprilTag markers tracking the rover
Textured photogrammetry scan of the terrain in ParaView
Heightmap of the terrain rendered from altimetry data
The VR scene: the rover as a red sphere, with geocache markers
A silhouetted visitor in front of the CAVE projection screen

2026SoloWebGL2, GLSL

Film grain generated from math, in the browser. Drag to reseed.

seed 0.370