Benjamin Teitler

Hey, my name is Benjamin Teitler and I am currently a PhD student in the field of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. When I am not flying high with the University of Maryland Gymkana Troupe, I sometimes write computer programs of various sorts.

  Publications

1.  B. Teitler, M. D. Lieberman, D. Panozzo, J.Sankaranarayanan, H. Samet, J. Sperling
NewsStand: A new view on news.
In W. G. Aref, M. F. Mokbel, H. Samet, M. Schneider, C. Shahabi, and O. Wolfson, editors, Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, pages 144-153, Irvine, CA, November. [link]
ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2009 Best Paper Award.
2.  J. Sankaranarayanan, H. Samet, B. Teitler, M.D. Lieberman, J. Sperling
TwitterStand: News in tweets.
In D. Agarwal, W. G. Aref, C.-T. Lu, M. F. Mokbel, P. Scheuermann, C. Shahabi, and O. Wolfson, editors, Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, pages 42-51, Seattle, WA, November 2009. [link]
Best University of Maryland Invention Finalist.

  Projects

Lowly Blocks (Demo)

  • Lowly blocks in a match 3 puzzle game inspired by Panel de Pon and its successors (Tetris Attack, Puzzle League).
  • Written in Java but rendered in OpenGL using the LWJGL bindings.
  • Uses a unique networking model to allow each player to have essentially no latency under reasonable network conditions (ping less than 1000 milliseconds). This is possible due to the limited interaction between boards.
  • Artwork provided by Might Vertex Games.
  • Runnable JAR file and Windows executable: Lowly Blocks

NewsStand (Demo)

  • News articles contain a wealth of implicit geographic content that if exposed to readers improves understanding of today's news. However, most articles are not explicitly geotagged with their geographic content, and few news aggregation systems expose this content to users. A new system named NewsStand is presented that collects, analyzes, and displays news stories in a map interface, thus leveraging on their implicit geographic content. NewsStand monitors RSS feeds from thousands of online news sources and retrieves articles within minutes of publication. It then extracts geographic content from articles using a custom-built geotagger, and groups articles into story clusters using a fast online clustering algorithm. By panning and zooming in NewsStand's map interface, users can retrieve stories based on both topical signicance and geographic region, and see substantially dierent stories depending on position and zoom level.
    

2D Kart Battle Game (Source)

  • Real time action racing game rendered using Java 2D API.
  • BSP Tree accelerated continuous collision detection using Separating Axis Theorem.
  • Waypoint based pathfinding for track navigation.
  • Artificial Intelligence agent implemented using an A* search on a dynamic dense graph with various game play heuristics. Full description can be read here.
  • Java source code and Windows bat file: 2D Kart Battle

3D Chicken Racing Simulation (Source)

Volume Rendering (Source)

  • Direct volume rendering using Volume Ray Casting technique.
  • Rendering and lighting of four different isosurfaces.
  • C++/OpenGL source code and Windows executable: Volume Rendering

Random Terrain Generator (Source)

Mice Game (Source)

  • Sadistic mice slaughtering game written in Java Swing. I wrote this during my freshman year of undergraduate study. It was inspired by Fish Club! (See below)
  • Place mice, watch them multiply and slaughter them using bombs, poison, and lightning.
  • Java source code and .class files: Mice
  • Screenshot