benjamin f spector

hi

i am a first-year phd student in cs at stanford working with the amazing chris re. i make ml go brr.

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. prod
  2. the halite programming competition

research

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

sometimes i write

  1. ai economics
  2. the generation game
  3. the pricing wars
  4. the scale mindset is expensive
  5. a love letter to mit's blackboards
  6. effective startup ideation
  7. specialization and the hive mind