Benjamin Berg
Assistant Professor at MIT Media Lab
Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Berg is an assistant professor and software engineer with 20 years of experience operating at the intersection of economics and computer science, currently based in Greater Boston. He blends academic research—now progressing toward a PhD at Carnegie Mellon—with production-grade systems experience from finance roles at SIG and internships at Google. His open-source contributions include substantive kernel work in the torvalds/linux tree (notably improvements to User Mode Linux and low-level regset/floating-point handling) as well as front-end UI development for the Sugar GTK educational shell. That mix of low-level systems engineering, UI polish, and quantitative finance tooling gives him a rare ability to translate economic models into robust, high-performance software. Colleagues describe him as someone who moves comfortably between research questions and practical implementation, with an appetite for improving code quality and system reliability.
20 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science at Duke UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (14)
c1710
kernel10
uid10
gtk10
front-end-development10
system-programming10
c1110
ui-design10
python10
linux-kernel10
x8610
interface-design9
signal-handling9
user-interface9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
sugarlabs/sugar
Aug 2007 - Sep 2009
Sugar GTK shell
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:46 commits in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily worked on the UI components of the Sugar GTK shell, implementing features related to the palette, tool buttons, and activities tray. They added functionality for drawing a gap between the palette and invoker, handled prelight states, and improved the palette's appearance and behavior. The user also made several code enhancements, including fixing a typo and making changes to the keyboard event handling, demonstrating proficiency in the project's UI implementation.
gtkshell
torvalds/linux
Nov 2022 - Feb 2023
Linux kernel source tree
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 2 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily contributed to the Linux kernel's User Mode Linux (UM) subsystem. Their work involved removing unused functions and making code improvements related to floating-point registers and signal handling. They also refactored the code to use the regset API and improved several areas of the code base to improve overall code quality and performance. Moreover, they introduced enhancements like setting a parent death signal and adding compilation assertions.
linux-kernel
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