Benson Ngai

👋

about me

I'm a senior studying CS + Math @ UT Austin under the Turing Scholars CS Honors program 🤘. I love working in the intersection of software engineering, biology, and ML/AI, but am constantly growing my knowledge in computer vision, systems, and entrepreneurship.

Outside of school, I love playing and competing in tennis 🎾, working out 💪, cooking 🍳, watching movies (especially animation) 🎬, and travelling ✈️.

where i've been

Omphalos Lifesciences

Software Engineer

🧬 Developed L++, a high-level programming language for efficiently simulating large-scale biosystems.

⚙️ Designed and implemented a multi-pass interpreter and transcompiler in C++ and C, composed of tokenization, parsing, syntax tree construction, symbol table generation, and error handling.

🧪 Developed an optimized, filtered SQL chemical database in C++ and Python, facilitating 300K+ chemical synonym-to-formula translations for the language’s simplified syntax.

🧑‍💻 Built a market-competitive integrated development environment (IDE) using Unreal Engine for L++, offering robust code-editing functionalities, efficient file management, and comprehensive build and debugging tools.

💰 Wrote and led efforts of $275K grant proposal submission with high prospects of securing company funding.

MoleculeGo

Software Engineer & Game Mechanics Lead

📱 Developed a geolocation educational biology app using Expo, funded by the National Science Foundation.

🎮 Built the front-end interactive gameplay using TypeScript, React Native and Google Maps API.

🏫 Oversaw team of 8 undergraduates and professors to design an educative experience for scientists.

🌎 Successfully launched the app in July 2021, attracting 250+ unique users across 14+ countries. Available on iOS and Android.

iPhone Cutout

Invstr

UI/UX Developer

🎨 Designed user-friendly UIs for a London-based investment and stock-trading simulator application.

🛠 Prototyped and performed UX analysis on as-built app designs using Figma with senior design lead.

🔍 Conducted thorough QA testing of the app’s front-end on regular product releases.

UT Dallas

Student Researcher

💊 Developed a generative transfer learning model with Python and TensorFlow to discover pharmaceuticals targeted at Cystic Fibrosis.

🔍 Presented GAN research to weekly graduate machine learning discussion group.

cool stuff i've worked on

🏆HackMIT 2022 Social Impact Prize Winner ($2k)

📱Developed a digital speech pathologist React.js + Flask web app in Python and JavaScript, featuring...

🔊User-tailored speech exercises.

👄Visual lip-tracker using facemesh detection to analyze movement correctness.

🔊Audio analyzer using a CNN to analyze pronunciation correctness.

🧼Super clean UI created by yours truly.

📠Developed an SECD Machine (aka. Landin's Machine) emulator using C and C++ for Scheme, a Lisp-based functional programming language.

📑Supported entire instruction set to compute lambda calculus expressions.

🎤Presented to computer architecture class.

life

🎵 FAVORITE SONG SLIDE by CALVIN HARRIS ft. FRANK OCEAN & MIGOS

🎧 FAVORITE ARTISTS DAVE, WIZKID, TRAVIS SCOTT, DANIEL CAESAR

🎾 MY RACKET YONEX VCORE 98

🐭 FAVORITE ANIMATION RATATOUILLE

FUN FACTS

1️⃣Born in New Zealand 🇳🇿

2️⃣Met Jack Harlow and Andrey Rublev on the same day

3️⃣Sang the wrong lyrics to "Safe and Sound" by Capital Cities on a Tiktok which ended up going viral

recently

last updated: august 12, 2024

📍 last visited new york city, ny

🛩️ next going to austin, tx

🔜 soon: starting senior year!