Armin Samii

I'm a 3D Computer Graphics software engineer, building interactive tools and visualizations for everyday people.

About

I am currently self-employed at Robot Armin, LLC and open to short-term contract work.

Previously, I helped humans and self-driving cars communicate with graphics & visualizations at Argo AI, leading the Visualization, Remote Guidance, and User Experience teams.

Prior to 2019, I worked on fashion-technology at Avametric, a virtual fitting room startup that helps you choose the best size for your body. Prior to 2015, I worked on Photoshop Fix and Mix at Adobe.

I received my Master's from the Visual Computing Lab at U.C. Berkeley, advised by James O'Brien and funded by the NSF GRFP. I received my Bachelor's from U.C. Santa Cruz, advised by James Davis.

I am actively developing the Ranked Choice Voting Visualizer - I believe that RCV will make our elections fairer, and the biggest obstacle to its widespread adoption is lack of understanding. I hope the Visualizer can fill some of that gap.

Email me at [first name].[last name]@gmail.com.

Last updated: February 2021

Projects

rcvis

Website, 2019-present

In a Ranked-Choice Voting election, if your top candidate doesn't win the election, your vote still counts: your vote is transferred to your next pick. RCVIS visualizes what happens in each round of an RCV election.

Website | Github

UberCheats

Chrome Extension, 2020

While delivering food on my bike on UberEATS, I discovered a bug in the app that leads to underpayments for drivers. UberCheats allows other couriers to detect when they have been underpaid.

Github | Chrome App Store | Press: Business Insider | Press: Salon

Baby Trump

Twitter Bot, 2020

Our former president acted like a baby. This twitterbot translates his tweets into infantese to make them more intelligible.

Github | Twitter | Medium

Red Friends, Blue Friends

Website, 2017

Senators only listen to their constituents. This lets you find your Facebook friends represented by specific Senators to influence Senate votes.

Github | Website

Transcroobie

Website, 2016

Human-corrected speech-to-text, combining Amazon Mechanical Turk with Google Speech API. Deprecated.

Github

Dashboards for arbitrary log data

Research Application, 2014

An interface to turn system logs into visual dashboards.

PDF | Poster

Vocabulary Quizzer

Flash Application (long live ActionScript), 2010

Created to help me study for the GRE Verbal Exam. A victim of the Flash End of Life.

Research & Patents

Generation of Improved Clothing Models

Patent, 2020

US Patent 20200250892 A1 (pending)

Google Patents

Clothing Model Generation and Display System

Patent, 2019

US Patent 20190130649 A1 (pending)

Google Patents

Using adaptive meshes in fixed-mesh pipelines

Poster, 2015

"Resampling Adaptive Cloth Simulations onto Fixed-Topology Meshes"
George Brown, Armin Samii, James F. O'Brien, and Rahul Narain
ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2015

Project Page

A Perceptually Based Model of Visual Adaptation

Thesis, 2014

A perceptual model that accounts for the time-varying changes to perceived color and brightness that occur due to time-varying adaptation and the transition between cone- and rod-mediated vision.

PDF

Aesthetics-driven automatic cropping

Paper, 2014

"Data-Driven Automatic Cropping for Semantic Composition Search"
Armin Samii, Zhe Lin, and Radomir Měch
Computer Graphics Forum 2014

PDF

Distance Metric for Image Comparison

Patent, 2014

US Patent 20140169684 A1

Google Patents

ARCSIM: Adaptive Remeshing for Cloth Sim

Paper, 2012

"Adaptive Anisotropic Remeshing for Cloth Simulation"
Rahul Narain, Armin Samii, and James F. O'Brien
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2012

Project Page

Image Sorter

Thesis, 2010

Sorts through your photo library. Automatically detects low-quality and repetitive photos, sorting photographs in a way that prioritizes both uniqueness and quality. Winner of the Huffman Prize.

UCSC Senior Thesis

Lightroom-backed image stylization

Research Application, 2011

Stylizing images in a reproducible way, showing you which Lightroom sliders to toggle. Trained on six photgraphers' Lightroom catalogs.

Slides | PDF

Garden Path

Research Application, 2011

For some pairs of flickering gradients, you will see a strip in the center where it appears to be static, called the "Garden Path". I built a simple Qt+OpenGL app to generate Garden Paths.

Project Page | Publication