Photo of me and my cat

Armin Samii

Just a guy on a bicycle, yelling about ranked-choice voting.

| About | Projects | Press | Research & Patents | Bartending | Contact |

About

I am working on Dashcam for your Bike, a company building tools to make cycling safer for city cyclists.

On the side, I also run RCVis, a data visualization website used to display the results of RCV elections throughout the U.S.

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: May 2022

Projects

Showing:
Dashcam for your Bike
Dashcam for your Bike
App, 2022-present
Dashcam app for everyday bicyclists.
Website | iOS Download | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn
311 Reporting
311 Reporting
Service, 2022
Aggregating the 311 reports from the Dashcam app to Pittsburgh city government
Twitter
rcvis
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
UberCheats
Chrome Extension, 2020
UberEATS has (had?) 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
Baby Trump
Twitter Bot, 2020
This twitterbot translates his tweets into infantese to make them more intelligible.
Github | Twitter | Medium
Argo AI Visualizations
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
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
Transcroobie
Website, 2016
Human-corrected speech-to-text, combining Amazon Mechanical Turk with Google Speech API. Deprecated.
Github
Log Stream Dataviz
Log Stream Dataviz
Research Application, 2014
An interface to turn system logs into visual dashboards.
PDF | Poster
Vocabulary Quizzer
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

Showing:
PGH Lab Cohort 7.0
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
RealLIST Startups
Dashcam for your Bike, 2022-01-25
RealLIST Honorable Mention
Fox 5 New York
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.
Website
Ballotpedia
Ballotpedia
Ranked Choice Voting, 2021-06-30
RCVis was used on Ballotpedia to visualize the results of the New York City Mayoral Primary.
Website
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
Tech Workers Coalition
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
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
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

Research & Patents

Showing:
Generation of Improved Clothing Models
Generation of Improved Clothing Models
Patent, 2020
US Patent 20200250892 A1 (pending)
Google Patents
Clothing Model Generation and Display System
Clothing Model Generation and Display System
Patent, 2019
US Patent 20190130649 A1 (pending)
Google Patents
Using adaptive meshes in fixed-mesh pipelines
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
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
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
Distance Metric for Image Comparison
Patent, 2014
US Patent 20140169684 A1
Google Patents
ARCSIM: Adaptive Remeshing for Cloth Sim
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
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
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
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

Showing:
Murder Mystery Party
Murder Mystery Party
Cocktail Menu, 2018
Each murder mystery participant was themed after a specific color, Clue-style.
Menu [pdf]
birthday party
birthday party
Cocktail Menu, 2017
Each drink is based on an item in his resume.
Menu [png] | Recipe Sheet [txt]
Avametric Holiday Party
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
CSGSA Masked Ball
Cocktail Menu, 2013
CSGSA Halloween party, for Berkeley EECS grad students.
Menu [png] | Recipe Sheet [pdf]
CSGSA Halloween Party
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:

MediumTwitterInstagramlast.fmYouTube

and at hello@arminsamii.com.

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