Benjamin Attal
About Me
Hi there! My name is Ben, and starting Fall 2019 I'll be working towards my PhD at the CMU Robotics Institute! I have a passion for computer graphics, computer vision, machine learning, video game development, and virtual/mixed reality. My current research is on real-time novel view synthesis from 360 video, with applications to virtual reality.
Projects

Platformer Level Optimization

Sparse to Dense Depth
GameS

Sphere

Rogue Wave
Work Experience
Computational Imaging Research Intern
Light
From September 2018 to May 2019, I worked on Light's computational imaging team as a research intern. My focus was been on improving depth capture for their commercial products using deep learning.
Research Assistant
Visual Computing Lab, Brown University
I've worked in Brown's visual computing Lab on various projects including:
- Deep multi-view stereo / multi-frame optical flow and occlusion prediction
- Real-time, deep novel view synthesis (NVS) from 360 video.
Research Assistant
Portal-ble
During the 2017-2018 school year, I worked in Professor Jeff Huang's lab on a project to improve direct hand-manipulation in mobile-phone augmented reality.
I contributed to the project by writing the software to calibrate a leap motion device with the mobile phone camera, the code to occlude virtual objects using depth data from the environment, and helped migrate our gesture engine to mobile. Additionally, I created several demos with the system.
Software Engineering Intern
Mathworks
During the summer of 2017, I worked with the Matlab Language Services team at Mathworks in Natick, MA. I was able to make several contributions to the upcoming Matlab release, including:
- Improving performance of struct field access
- Improving performance of matrix indexing primitives using Matlab's shared data copy mechanism
- Refactoring core indexing code for string and matrix data types
Teaching Assistant
Brown University CS Department
I've served as an undergraduate teaching assistant for Introduction to Computer Graphics, 2D Game Engines, and as a head teaching assistant for 3D Game Engines at Brown. As a TA, I have written project helper code for students, developed web demos to illustrate difficult concepts, edited and given lectures, and held office hours.
Software Engineering Intern
Squarespace
During the summer of 2013, I interned at Squarespace. While there, I fixed bugs on the Squarespace Q&A page, and created a prototype of a new backend for the customer support knowledge base.
Skills
Computer Graphics and Computer Vision
Machine Learning and Deep Learning
Game Engines
Programming Languages
Python, C++, C, Java, Matlab, Javascript
Tools and Libraries
OpenGL, OpenCV, Tensorflow, PyTorch