Benjamin Hoffman

Hi! I am a second-year PhD student in the Networked Systems Group (NSG) at ETH Zurich and associated PhD researcher at the ETH AI Center, working on Machine Learning (ML), Control, and Language Models in systems and networking under the supervision of Prof. Laurent Vanbever and Prof. Gioele Zardini. I’m interested in using algorithms, ML, and control theory to understand how complex systems and networks work and how we can model, interpret, and control them in a robust and efficient manner. My current research revolves around enabling ML-based models and controllers to generalize efficiently across different contexts and tasks, for example video streaming or congestion control. Beyond that, I am also interested in improving the networking stack for AI applications and ML workloads.

Prior to starting my PhD, I obtained a BSc in Mechanical Engineering and a MSc in Robotics, Systems and Control from ETH Zurich. During my master’s, I did an academic exchange at Lund University in Sweden. For my master’s thesis, I worked on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with the Computational Robotics Lab (CRL) (Prof. Stelian Coros), as well as the Learning & Adaptive Systems Group (LAS) (Prof. Andreas Krause) at the ETH AI Center.

I have also done internships in management consulting at Bain & Company, in data science and ML at eraneos, and in robotics, software engineering and ML at Güdel.

Talks

Into the Wild: Real-World Testing for ML-Based ABR

Slides Publication

Publications

Running Theses

Supervised Theses