Ben Schmidt
Chief Technology Officer at Nomic AI
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Schmidt is a technology leader and researcher with 14 years of experience who serves as CTO and Vice President of Information Design at Nomic AI, guiding product and engineering strategy at the intersection of AI, data visualization, and scalable backends. He combines academic rigor—a Princeton PhD in History and prior roles directing digital humanities at NYU and teaching—with hands-on software contributions, from backend robustness in large-data tooling to front-end visualization work on browser-scale scatterplots. At Harvard he built the Bookworm text-visualization platform and later launched multi-year funding and fellowship programs at NYU that seeded hundreds of thousands in external awards, demonstrating skill in both research translation and institutional program-building. On GitHub he has contributed practical fixes and features to high-impact projects that process massive multimedia and embedding datasets, reflecting a comfort shipping production-grade code across the stack. Based in New York, he brings a rare blend of humanities-driven curiosity and engineering discipline that helps translate complex data problems into usable tools and funded programs.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's, Social Studies, Bachelor's, Social Studies at Harvard UniversityPhD, History, PhD, History at Princeton University
Stackoverflow
136reputation
12kreached
5answers
0questions
Github Skills (26)
data-visualizations10
webgl10
javascript10
back-end-development10
python10
data-visualisation10
ui-design10
uid10
front-end-development10
http-request10
error-handling10
data-visualization10
backend10
apidoc9
api9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
nomic-ai/deepscatter
Oct 2018 - Jan 2023
Zoomable, animated scatterplots in the browser that scales over a billion points
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 61 reviews, 216 commits in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Ben appears to be contributing to the front-end of the `deepscatter` project, a data visualization tool for the browser. The commits primarily involve modifications to the `deepscatter.js` and `src/deepscatter.js` files, which suggests UI component development. These commits included adding a function to export SVG with text and integrating changes from the master branch, pointing towards feature implementations and potentially bug fixes. The user also seems to be involved in improving label rendering and other visual aesthetics.
scalesbrowseranimatedwebgljavascript
nomic-ai/nomic
Nov 2022 - Jan 2023
Interact, analyze and structure massive text, image, embedding, audio and video datasets
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:99 reviews, 10 commits, 44 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on enhancing the backend functionality of the Nomic Atlas client. Their contributions include implementing retry mechanisms for failed shard uploads, addressing error handling within the Atlas client, and refactoring parts of the code. They also worked on setting failure parameters and corrected a missing f-string within the codebase. This involved modifications to the core Atlas client code and test files.
pythonmachine-learningatlas-databaseatlascosine-similarity
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