Hi, I'm Ben
About Me
I am a second-year honors Computer Science undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, where I work with Professor Caiwen Ding on systems and computer architecture research. Previously, I worked at the University of Chicago under Professor Kyle Chard on high-performance computing research. I have been fortunate to have my work supported by the National Science Foundation, the Data Science Institute at UChicago, and the University of Minnesota.
My interests range the full stack of computing including computer architecture, distributed and parallel systems, and information theory. These interests have come as a result of years of tinkering with computers and electronics in personal projects including building FPV drones, biometric locking systems, homemade compute clusters, and more.
I am especially drawn to work that involves investigating the relationship between low-level implementations and the downstream performance of applied systems. On this front, I am always looking for problems in unfamiliar areas to broaden my research exposure. Long term, I hope to pursue a PhD in ECE, CS, or a related field.
Research Interests
My current work focuses on:
- GPU kernel programming and optimizations
- data compression for scientific and signal workloads
- serverless inference and high-performance distributed systems
- computer architecture, operating systems, and parallel algorithms
Recent Work
-
Transit-Layer Tensor Representation for Serverless Inference
B. Mechels, S. Shi, W. Wang, K. Chard. Under conference review, poster submission. -
FPTC: A Fast Parallel Transform-based Codec for Efficient
Asymmetric Signal Compression
B. Mechels, R. Billmeyer, A. Chen, S. Li, C. Ding. Under conference review. arXiv:2605.01086, 2026.
News
- Aug 2026
- Presented at UChicago Data Science Institute and Argonne National Laboratory
- Jun 2026
- Started as a research intern at the University of Chicago
- May 2026
- Published FPTC paper preprint to arXiv at arXiv:2605.01086
- Dec 2025
- Made College of Science & Engineering Dean's List
- May 2025
- Graduated from Washburn High School
- Aug 2024
- Started as a teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota