I'm a programmer and data analyst with a background in science and engineering. A recurring theme in almost all of my work is the illumination of otherwise invisible information via aggregation, tracking and analysis.
I develop algorithms and pipelines for discovering solar system objects in large astronomical transient source datasets and have found thousands of new objects to date. Ongoing results around this effort are published at benengebreth.org.
First engineering hire at camelcamelcamel and 50% of the coding team. Responsible for all aspects of site direction, design, development and maintenance. Camelcamelcamel is widely regarded as the premier price tracking tool for Amazon.com. In 2023 I became a part-time consultant for the company so I could focus on solar system object discovery.
I've consulted for many organizations in the past and ran the websites deptofnumbers.com and housingtracker.net. HousingTracker was widely cited in the runup and aftermath of the housing bubble as a source for real-time housing price and inventory data. Department of Numbers highlighted numerous other economic time series including unemployment, jobs, rent and income data. Clients have included hedge funds, Wall Street research firms and government agencies.
In collaboration with Geophysicist Felix Waldhauser, I developed a web tool for analysis of earthquake data combining Dr. Waldhauser's real-time earthquake relocation algorithms with map and cross-sectional visualization tools.
At Majestic I worked as a data analyst and programmer in the company's R&D group. My primary responsibility was to create new, informative research products from proprietary datasets. This work required gathering disparate data from various sources to produce informative analysis for clients seeking economic or financial insight.
In 2005 I was granted a 1 year Research Fellowship at Eyebeam — an art & technology non-profit. I worked in the organization's OpenLab to promote "R&D for the public domain" by building open source web-based tools and data sets. I produced a web application to track and analyze electricity use called Personal Kyoto and a web tool for collecting and republishing bookmarks from the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us. I collaborated with artist Evan Roth to create White Glove Tracking — a crowdsourced study of Michael Jackson's first moonwalk. I also worked with artist Bill Dolson to design synthetic meteor trajectories for his Reentry exhibition.
As an engineer at JPL I designed and developed a GUI interface using MATLAB for spacecraft trajectory optimization as well as initial guess software that helps the user provide more physically appropriate starting guesses to the optimizer. I also did numerous preliminary design and feasibility studies for spacecraft trajectories.