Ben Firner's Home Page

Ben in front of the colloseum

Email:
b firner at winlab period rutgers period edu

Hello, I am Bernhard (Ben) Firner. I am currently working at NVIDIA as part of a team working on autonomous vehicles at the Bell Works building in Holmdel, NJ. Our goal is to train an end to end neural network to drive a car in a human-like manner. NVIDIA's CEO talked about our project near the end of GTC 2016, here My current interests are machine learning, good software engineering practices, and teaching. My hobbies are running and playing the violin.

I finished my PhD in 2014 after studying wireless networks in Rutgers University's WINLAB under the guidance of my advisor, Dr. Yanyong Zhang, and Dr. Rich Howard. The final result of my thesis was a wireless protocol that allows small wireless sensors to run for more than 10 years on a coin cell battery. Before joining NVIDIA I worked with a small startup company, Inpoint, to create environmental monitoring systems for the laboratory animal care market, and also taught a variety of computer engineering and computer science courses at Rutgers.

I received my bachelors and masters degrees at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken before working on my PhD at Rutgers. In between going to school I also worked at ITT Avionics as a software engineer for a year and a half.

Take a look at my research page for more about information my research when I was working on my PhD, or if you are are looking for something from one of the informal classes or discussions at WINLAB then check my weblog.