benjamin f spector

i am a second year phd student in cs at stanford working with the amazing chris re. i make ml go brr. i also am lucky to run cofactory.ai with chappy asel and silas alberti.

special thanks to the hertz foundation for funding my phd. ♡

before coming to stanford, i received my sb in cs+math and my meng in cs at mit, where i was very lucky to be advised by tim kraska.

reach me via carrier pigeon.

things i did

1. cofactory
2. prod
3. halite

research

1. accelerating llm inference with staged speculative decoding (esfomo@icml2023)
2. learned string index structures for in-memory databases (thesis)
3. [poster] characterization and performance predictions of l-mode plasmas in the sparc tokamak (apsdpp2021)
4. bounding the last mile: efficient learned string indexing (aidb@vldb2021)
5. preventing adversarial use of datasets through fair core-set construction (priml@neurips2019)
6. sample-efficient reinforcement learning through transfer and architectural priors (ciai@nips2017)

sometimes i write

1. the kids markets aren't alright
2. ai economics
3. the generation game
4. the pricing wars
5. the scale mindset is expensive
6. a love letter to mit's blackboards
7. effective startup ideation
8. specialization and the hive mind

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also do not scrape this website to train ai models. i gotta keep my edge over our ai overlords somehow.