Ben Giacalone

Open to jobs involving software engineering, machine learning, and/or research.

Skills

Preferred Languages: Rust, Python, Typescript

Preferred Frameworks: Django, Svelte, Vue, PyTorch, Numpy

Education

Rochester Institute of Technology — Rochester, NY

Combined Bachelors/Masters of Computer Science, Expected May 2024

Experience

PathAI: Software Engineering Intern — Boston, MA (Sep - Dec 2022)

  • Assisted with the development of slide annotation service using Django, Postgres, and Vue.js.
  • Implemented new designs off Figma and upgraded pre existing components to use Vue’s Composition API, Typescript, and Testing Library.

Wells Fargo: Technology Intern — Charlotte, NC (Jun - Aug 2022)

  • Created unit tests for the Commercial Lending Office using JUnit 5 and Spring Boot.

PathAI: Software Engineering Intern — Boston, MA (Jan - May 2022)

  • Assisted with the development of slide annotation service using Django, Postgres, and Vue.js.
  • Helped design and implement metadata standardization features for backend using Celery.

Rochester Institute of Technology: Student Lab Instructor — Henrietta, NY (Aug - Dec 2021)

  • Assisted professors through grading and answering student questions during labs.
  • Provided additional mentoring for students outside of lab hours.

Bill Giacalone Artwork LLC: Web Developer — Charlotte, NC (May - Aug 2021)

  • Developed an online art gallery and storefront platform with Python, HTML/Javascript, Flask, and Stripe.
  • Created Python, SQL, and Selenium based automation tools.

Papers

Beneath the [MASK]: An Analysis of Structural Query Tokens in ColBERT

B. Giacalone, G. Paiement, Q. Tucker, and R. Zanibbi — ECIR 2024

Projects

RL Template

  • Wrote implementations of state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms.
  • Integrated sample Rust code with Python-based codebase, increasing memory efficiency and speed.

Smash RL

  • Implemented the experience encoder used in the paper “Large-Scale Retrieval for Reinforcement Learning”.

DTrack

  • Created Vue-inspired reactive UI library for Godot using GDScript.

Organizations

Multidisciplinary Robotics: Pacbot Team — (Aug 2019 - Now)

  • Collaborated with other programmers and engineers to write code for Harvard’s Pacbot competition.
  • Used Python, PyTorch, and Rust to teach an agent to play the game Pacman using MCTS with Q networks.

RIT AI: R&D Manager — (Dec 2020 - Dec 2021)

  • Helped other members work on projects to increase their understanding of AI.