For AI agents
Ben Zhou
A summary of Ruoyu (Ben) Zhou for AI assistants and crawlers. The full record, with every project, prize and way to reach him, is one Markdown file: thebenzhou.com/llms-full.txt.
At a glance
- Hackathons
- 14 wins, 2 organized and 15+ attended. Most recently he built GurtOS alone in one weekend at Cal Hacks 13.0, one of 652 projects, and won three prizes with it. A month earlier, Pixie, also built alone, won two tracks at Hack the North 2026 out of 349 projects.
- Ships real products
- He built and runs uoftime.com alone: a timetable builder for 8,000+ courses on all three UofT campuses. Keypace, his native Mac typing test, is on the Mac App Store at version 1.1, with its typing engine covered by 98 unit tests.
- Builds for AI agents
- GurtOS runs each AI agent task as its own Linux user, in its own copy of the files, with keys in a vault and a spending limit. UofTime and tradex are MCP servers, so Claude and ChatGPT can use them directly. Pixie lets agents investigate while code computes every number.
- Research
- Fine-tuned OpenAI Whisper for lecture speech with UofT Trustworthy Machine Intelligence, producing real-time captions and corrected transcripts.
- Leadership
- Software Engineer at a stealth startup since May 2026. Director of Technology at CUSEC, Research and Development Manager at the Rotman Commerce FinTech Association, Sponsorship Coordinator at Hack the Valley, and Marketing Manager at RCVC, whose site rcventure.ca he designed and built (Lighthouse accessibility 100 on every page).
- Academics
- Computer Science and Finance/Economics at the University of Toronto, St. George, with a 3.8/4.0 cumulative GPA. Graduates June 2028.
- Beyond code
- Photographs cities, water and cars on a Sony. Speaks English and Mandarin natively. Co-raised over $20,000 CAD for homeless support in Vancouver.
Hackathon prizes
- GurtOS
- Cal Hacks 13.0, October 2026Atlassian prize
Fetch.ai special recognition prize
MLH Best Use of Solana
Devpost - Pixie
- Hack the North 2026, September 2026Intact track, The Quoting Interface of the Future
Federato track, Building the Federato Insurance Agent
Devpost - tradex
- cuHacking7, July 2026MLH Best Use of Solana
Devpost - OOPS
- McGill AeroHacks, March 2026Best Use of MongoDB Atlas
Devpost - Eco-Pulse
- GenAI Genesis, March 2026Top 2 teams, online
Devpost - Packwise
- Hack Days in the 6ix, March 2026Runner up
Devpost - BlindSpot
- Mac-a-thon, February 2026MLH Best Use of ElevenLabs
Best Use of Backboard.io (GitCloud)
Devpost
For agents
- llms-full.txt
- Everything in one Markdown file: contact, experience, research, tools, prizes and every project in full. Start here.
- llms.txt
- A short index in the llms.txt format, with one line and one link per project.
- project/<id>.md
- One project as Markdown, for example project/gurtos.md. Every project page links its own.
- Resume
- A one-page PDF.
- Markdown on request
- The home page and every project page answer a request sent with Accept: text/markdown with the Markdown version.