About

I am the Founder of Dashcam for your Bike, a startup building tools to make streets safer for city cyclists.

I founded and continue to lead RCVis, which has been used by over a million voters worldwide to better understand the results of Ranked Choice Voting elections.

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, shipping some of the first mobile Photoshop apps to millions of users.

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 live in the bridgiest city in the world: Pittsburgh, PA. I volunteer with March on Harrisburg and Better Streets Lawrenceville.

Email me at hello@arminsamii.com.

Last updated: Oct 2022

Projects

Dashcam for your Bike

App, 2022-present

Dashcam app for everyday bicyclists.

Website | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

Hazard Reporting

Service, 2022

Aggregating the 311 reports from the Dashcam app to Pittsburgh city government, and putting them in an interactive, filterable map

Hazard Map | Twitter

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

UberEATS has a bug that led to underpayments for gig workers. UberCheats allows couriers to detect when they have been underpaid.

Github | Press: Wired | Press: Salon

Baby Trump

Twitter Bot, 2020

This twitterbot translates his tweets into infantese to make them more intelligible.

Github | Twitter | Medium

Argo AI Visualizations

Video, 2020-10-30

An example of the visualizations we built at Argo. In my opinion, Argo has the best dataviz of any autonomous vehicle company. I'm biased, but you can check it and decide for yourself.

Video

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

Log Stream Dataviz

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. Has gone wherever old Flash apps go to rest.

Press

Pittsburgh City Paper

Article, 2022-12-22

On how Dashcam helped BikePGH win funding to protect one of Pittsburgh's flagship bike lanes.

Advocates celebrate city funding for Penn Avenue bike lane upgrades

CityCast Pittsburgh

Podcast, 2022-10-12

Podcast episode about the importance of better bike infrastructure, based on an incident captured with Dashcam for your Bike

Who Will Respect Bike Lanes If Even Police Won't?

City Paper PGH

Article, 2022-10-07

I captured this interaction with the Dashcam for your Bike app, though this article shares my personal story.

Video shows police officer belittling resident when confronted on illegal parking

technical.ly

Article, 2022-10-19

It is claimed that I am an influencer of code. Who am I to deny it? #influencer

RealLIST Engineers 2022: These 16 tech leaders are changing Pittsburgh’s code

WPXI

Video, 2022-09-16

We organized Park(ing) Day 2022 in Lawrenceville, and WPXI spoke to Better Streets Lawrenceville about improving street safety. I appear around 1:45 to talk about improvements to Main & Butler.

Better Streets Lawrenceville working to make streets safer for all

technical.ly

Article, 2022-09-22

Dashcam for your Bike unveils Hazard Map to showcase bike lane hazards, promote safety

The Business Journals

Video, 2022-09-23

Article from The Business Journals about Dashcam for your Bike's Hazard Map

Dashcam for your Bike identifies city streets with most bike lane obstructions

WPXI

Video, 2022-10-12

TV Interview with WPXI Pittsburgh discussing how Dashcam makes streets safer

City of Pittsburgh partners with app to make travel safer for cyclists

PGH Lab Cohort 7.0

Dashcam for your Bike, 2022-03-10

Announcing PGH Lab’s 7.0 Cohort

PittsburghInno

Article, 2021-12-28

An early announcement of PGH Lab Cohort 7.0

PGH Lab announces seventh cohort of startups

technical.ly

Article, 2022-02-23

What does ‘local’ mean now for Pittsburgh startup founders?

RealLIST Startups

Dashcam for your Bike, 2022-01-25

RealLIST Honorable Mention

Fox 5 New York

Ranked Choice Voting, 2021-06-03

TV Interview with Fox 5 New York. Soundbite at 2:45 into the video, explaining the benefits of Ranked Choice Voting.

Video

RCV Tabulator Release

Ranked Choice Voting, 2021-03-12

Interview for the release of the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center Universal Tabulator

Video

Gothamist

Ranked Choice Voting, 2021-06-30

Gothamist used RCVis for their official 2021 NYC primary reporting. I worked with Gothamist to create the visualizations in this article.

Article

Ballotpedia

Ranked Choice Voting, 2021-06-30

RCVis was used on Ballotpedia to visualize the results of the New York City Mayoral Primary.

Website

City & State PA

Ranked Choice Voting, 2022-07-05

In which I'm quoted discussing how RCV could have helped in the 2022 PA Primaries.

Making the case for second place: Ranked-choice voting explained

Bucks County Herald

Ranked Choice Voting, 2022-05-19

Press Release on the 2022 Primaries, and how RCV can help

Ranked Choice Voting gives voters more choice Crowded primary fields leave voters unsatisfied and unrepresented

Salon

UberCheats, 2020-08-20

Programmers say Uber Eats is systematically underpaying their workers.

Business Insider

UberCheats, 2020-08-20

UberEats could be underpaying delivery drivers on 21% of trips, according to a programmer who reportedly built a tool that found the app was lowballing the miles that drivers traveled

Tech Workers Coalition

UberCheats, 2020-08-20

UberEats could be underpaying delivery drivers on 21% of trips, according to a programmer who reportedly built a tool that found the app was lowballing the miles that drivers traveled

Screen Rant

UberCheats, 2020-08-21

UberCheats Chrome Extension Checks For Uber Eats Underpayments

Digital Trends [ES]

UberCheats, 2020-08-21

Denuncian que UberEats le paga menos a sus repartidores

Tech Worker’s Coalition

UberCheats, 2020-09-12

Issue 10: Wages of Short-Lived Startups

VICE

UberCheats, 2021-02-18

Uber Shuts Down App That Told Drivers If Uber Underpaid Them

Daily Mail

UberCheats, 2021-02-18

Google pulls UberCheats app which lets drivers check their tips to see if they are being underpaid by the ride sharing firm, after Uber files false trademark against the Chrome extension

CNET Roadshow

UberCheats, 2021-02-18

Google removes app that calculated if Uber drivers were underpaid

PC Mag

UberCheats, 2021-02-19

Uber Gets UberCheats Pulled From Google

Richard Stallman’s Blog

UberCheats, 2021-02-21

How Uber cheats drivers

Wired

UberCheats, 2021-02-24

Wired article featuring UberCheats and other software used to make gig work more fair.

Gig Workers Gather Their Own Data to Check the Algorithm’s Math

Wall Street Journal

UberCheats, 2021-06-23

Uber, Lyft Drivers Race to Apps That Make Contract Work a Better Gig

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

Bartending

Murder Mystery Party

Cocktail Menu, 2018

Each murder mystery participant was themed after a specific color, Clue-style.

Menu [pdf]

birthday party

Cocktail Menu, 2017

Each drink is based on an item in his resume.

Menu [png] | Recipe Sheet [txt]

Avametric Holiday Party

Cocktail Menu, 2015

At the time of this party, we had two teams, Team Green and Team Hippocorn, as well as a leaky roof.

Menu [png] | Recipe Sheet [txt]

CSGSA Masked Ball

Cocktail Menu, 2013

CSGSA Halloween party, for Berkeley EECS grad students.

Menu [png] | Recipe Sheet [pdf]

CSGSA Halloween Party

Cocktail Menu, 2012

The presidential election was around the corner when the CSGSA (Computer Science Graduate Student Association at Berkeley) had its halloween party.

Menu [png] | Recipe Sheet [txt]

Get in touch

I am Very Online™ and only a month or two behind the Good Good Memes. I even had a TikTok once. I recommend you follow me on Twitter, though feel free to choose another presence:

and at hello@arminsamii.com.