I currently work as a Research Scientist at Unity Technologies at the intersection of machine learning and graphics.

From ~2018-2021 I worked with Ken Perlin as a Research Scientist at the Future Reality Lab at New York University (NYU Courant), where our work explored the intersection between procedural generation, machine learning and computer graphics.

Previously ~2019-2021 I was a co-founder and the CTO of Autotoon where I drove development of an experimental low latency real-time framework for social AR / VR - in addition to bringing procedural animation and machine learning together to breathe life into shared worlds with virtual characters.

From ~2017 to 2019 I studied for my Masters in Computer Science (MSCS) at New York University - Courant Institute, focusing on machine learning, computer vision, computer graphics.

From ~2013-2016 I studied Computer Science specializing in Computer Graphics & Visualization and Machine Intelligence (B.S. in CS) at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana), where I was a Research Assistant and later a Research Fellow at VACCINE where our work in machine learning, graphics and distributed systems to understand social media trends across different spatiotemporal scales was published at EuroVis, CHI, and VAST.

Check out my YouTube channel for some old videos.

Publications

Conference:

Zero-Shot Multi-Modal Artist-Controlled Retrieval and Exploration of 3D Object Sets - Benjamin Ahlbrand*, Kristofer Schlachter*, Zhu Wang, Valerio Ortenzi, Ken Perlin - SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 Technical Communication (equal contributions) [paper]

The Outpost - Kris Layng, Michael Gold, Benjamin Ahlbrand, Zhenyi He, Ken Perlin - ACM SIGGRAPH 2020 Immersive Pavilion [video paper project page]

TopoGroups: Context-Preserving Visual Illustration of Multi-Scale Spatial Aggregates ‐ ACM CHI 2017 Jiawei Zhang, Abish Malik, Benjamin Ahlbrand, Niklas Elmqvist, Ross Maciejewski, David Ebert [paper, video]

A Visual Analytics Framework for Microblog Data Analysis at Multiple Scales of Aggregation - EuroVis 2016 Computer Graphics Forum, Jiawei Zhang, Benjamin Ahlbrand, Abish Malik, Junghoon Chae, Zhiyu Min, Sungahn Ko, David Ebert [paper]

VAST Challenge 2015 Workshop:

Chae, J., Wang, G., Ahlbrand, B., Gorantla, M.B., Zhang, J., Chen, S., Xu, H., Zhao, J., Hatton, W., Malik, A. and Ko, S., 2015, October. Visual analytics of heterogeneous data for criminal event analysis VAST challenge 2015: Grand challenge. In Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), 2015 IEEE Conference on (pp. 149‑150). IEEE.

Hatton, W., Zhao, J., Gorantla, M.B., Chae, J., Ahlbrand, B., Xu, H., Chen, S., Wang, G., Zhang, J., Malik, A. and Ko, S., 2015, October. Visual analytics for detecting communication patterns. In Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), 2015 IEEE Conference on (pp. 137‑138). IEEE.

Zhao, J., Wang, G., Chae, J., Xu, H., Chen, S., Hatton, W., Towers, S., Gorantla, M.B., Ahlbrand, B., Zhang, J. and Malik, A., 2015, October. ParkAnalyzer: Characterizing the movement patterns of visitors VAST 2015 Mini‑Challenge 1. In Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), 2015 IEEE Conference on (pp. 179‑180). IEEE.

Patents:

System and method for reconstructing a VR avatar with full body pose - Kenneth Perlin, Benjamin Ahlbrand, Charles Hendee [patent]