Meet the New Face of Engineering and Computing:
Ben Fine
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Hometown: Charleston, SC
Major: Computer science and engineering
Ben FIne is in his fourth year at Carolina with an expected date of graduation in Spring 2009. After his undergrad degree, he plans to attend graduate school to attain his Ph.D. in machine learning.
"My main goal is to become a professor at the collegiate level." says Fine.
Currently Fine is doing research with Dr. O’Kane as his advisor. He is working on a system that will be able to "learn" a person's day to day patterns and determine if some thing may be wrong.
Fine is also the president of ACM@USC, Peer Coordinator at Preston Residential College, Microsoft Student-Partner, and has his own photography business. He is also a brother of Kappa Kappa Psi National Honorary Band Fraternity and takes care of the 120 gallon coral reef tank at Preston.
Reports Fine, "ACM@USC was reformed about a year ago by Adam Wong and myself. The main purpose of this organization is to advance the science and art of all fields of computer science. Last semester was a good time for us. We held the Halo 3 tournament, which was covered by the Daily Gamecock, had a very good turnout to the majority of our meetings, and we created a good bounding board for this semester and the next. This semester ACM@USC wants to host a few more events and multiple free tutoring hours for all students that are enrolled in a computer science class. This organization has the opportunity to positively affect young and old computer scientists for many years to come, and I am very lucky to be right in the middle of it."
Fine quips that as far is his activities outside of the classroom, he has a problem saying "no" -- that he is the type of person that will try to do everything humanly possible, "so I will not bore you with a long list of things that I like to do. However, here are a few things that I hold dear. The biggest influence in my life is music; it is truly the greatest of the arts." He has been involved with some sort of music for his entire life. Fine played the violin for six years before making the move to the French horn. His freshman year in college, he was actually a music performance major.
Another one of Fine's passions is photography. "I can still remember the day that I fell in love with photography. Ever since that day I haven’t put the camera down."
The last big passion Fine has is that of teaching. "About my junior year in high school I realized how much I enjoyed teaching. Since then I have tutored various subjects, such as computer science and photography. I feel that teaching is the best way to learn and grow as an individual."
Fine says that he has enjoyed his time here at the University of South Carolina and hopes that "every one else here will have some of the great experiences I have had. Please feel free to stop me in the halls, or stop by the ACM meetings if you have any questions about ACM. This organization can do great things for every member involved and I hope that my work with ACM will help it grow in the coming years."
