He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2012. He also obtained his M.S. (2008) and B.S. (2006) in computer science at UIUC. He was a visiting professor at Sandia National Laboratories in the summer of 2013 and an intern at Yahoo! Research during the summers of 2010 and 2011. Ben received the Best Paper Award at SPAA 2013 and Best Student Paper Award at SODA 2010.