Get to know Ben
Please describe the UPP-funded or affiliated project(s) you worked on.
I assisted Leonard Orzol with his work on the Detroit Lake profiler project. Additionally, I worked with Anna Stull on several wildfire deployments as a radio operator. Alongside these projects, I worked with Ryan Heath and Peter Lindstrom on a large encryption migration project.
Who are your USGS supervisor and PSU advisor?
Dar Crammond (retired) and Dr. Christof Teuscher (teuscher@pdx.edu)
Provide a link to your project website, publication, or presentation (if applicable).
"Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Radiation Localization"
What were your primary responsibilities/roles of your position?
My primary role was to assist water scientists and computer specialists with any IT or Software needs that they had while conducting work for the Oregon Water Science Center.
What did you learn from this experience? What skills did you gain from your research experience?
From a technical perspective, I learned SCCM, Powershell, and some amount of frontend web development. From a professional perspective, I became a qualified Radio Operator and opened a taskbook to train as a Communications Technician. From a personal perspective, I learned about the neat opportunities to have impact at both the state and federal levels with the USGS, especially when it comes to climate science.
What aspects of your project did you enjoy the most?
Wildfire deployments during 2020 was something that I was very happy I was given the opportunity to assist with.
What are you doing now?
I am a software engineer for a large company working in R&D.
Which PSU courses have been the most useful to you in your job(s) since graduation? Why?
Karla Fant’s lower division sequences for computer science students gave me fundamentals that I use almost very day. Most of the tools you learn - and definitely the command line skills - are frequently used on remote servers and edge devices. Understanding basic C++ helped me transition to C when I worked for AWS, and then C++ again in Robotics in a way that can be difficult for folks who start with memory-safe languages. Proficiency demos are structured similarly to the live coding sections of interviews.
Algorithms and Operating Systems fundamentally changed my understanding of how software works and what trade-offs are made when making design decisions. OSTEP is still one of my treasured books. Both have also been particularly important when it comes to optimizing for performance.
Site Reliability Engineering and Web Security taught me how to get around in the cloud and on the command line, but most importantly how to dig into logs. A surprising amount of software engineering is reading logs looking for clues.
Are there any courses you now wish you had taken at PSU, based on your job requirements? Why?
I never took a databases course, which was a little odd when I was a part of the In-Memory Databases organization at AWS. My lack of SQL knowledge I’m sure will come to haunt me as I get deeper into machine learning roles.