Armin is available for hire
Hire ArminArmin Samii
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Pittsburgh, United States
Toptal member since October 17, 2022
Bio
Armin is the CEO of Dashcam for your Bike, a company building tools to make cycling safer for city cyclists. He also runs RCVis.com, a data visualization website used to display the results of RCV elections throughout the USA. He helped self-driving cars communicate with graphics and visualizations at Argo AI, managing three teams, visualization tools, remote guidance, and UX. Armin is a passionate expert in computer graphics and interactive 3D tools.
Portfolio
Dashcam for Your Bike
C#, Computer Graphics, Unity, User Experience (UX), TypeScript, Mapbox...
RCVis.com
Django, Python, JavaScript, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Heroku
Argo AI
C++, Computer Graphics, OpenGL, Qt 5, OpenSceneGraph
Experience
- C++ - 13 years
- Computer Graphics - 11 years
- Qt - 11 years
- Python - 7 years
- Django - 5 years
- Heroku - 5 years
- Unity - 2 years
- C# - 2 years
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
MacOS, Vim Text Editor, C++, C#, Python, Django, Unity, Unity3D
The most amazing...
...thing with RCVis is that it has helped over a million voters understand the results of ranked-choice voting elections and is used by governments across the USA.
Work Experience
CEO
2022 - PRESENT
Dashcam for Your Bike
- Launched a pre-revenue company with an app used by thousands worldwide.
- Partnered with municipal governments, creating infrastructural changes to bike lanes throughout Pittsburgh.
- Raised enough funds to hire a part-time employee to help with marketing, outreach, and scaling the product to prove additional traction before seeking investment.
Technologies: C#, Computer Graphics, Unity, User Experience (UX), TypeScript, Mapbox, Firebase, Unity3D, Unity3D Native Plugin Interface, Augmented Reality (AR), ARToolKit, AR Interfaces
Founder
2019 - PRESENT
RCVis.com
- Created a ranked-choice voting election visualization website used by dozens of cities in their official election reporting.
- Developed a website that can handle unexpected spikes of 10,000 times the average number of users in hours when election results are first released.
- Inspired by the data visualization used by New York City's Board of Elections, the website is used as the primary visualization by dozens more cities across the USA.
- Organized in addition to the USA elections, the website hosts ranked-choice voting elections in Ireland from dozens of organizations worldwide and thousands of straw polls held worldwide.
Technologies: Django, Python, JavaScript, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Heroku
Team Lead and Manager
2019 - 2020
Argo AI
- Led three separate teams, including incident command system and other managers.
- Built a team from 4 to 14, including advocating for and hiring our first dedicated UX experts.
- Changed hiring practices to improve team diversity, from 0% of folks from underrepresented communities to 40%.
- Created thousands of lines of code in the top 5% of developers regarding features shipped while being a manager.
- Managed over a dozen ad-hoc employees from across the company for specific projects that needed urgent delivery, coordinating the work of the full-time team and the ad-hoc engineers.
Technologies: C++, Computer Graphics, OpenGL, Qt 5, OpenSceneGraph
Team Lead and Manager
2015 - 2019
Avametric
- Led teams that built internal software used full-time by 15% of the company and part-time by 50% of the company.
- Planned and led optimizations to the software that led to a tenfold increase in productivity within 12 months of joining, leading to four employees being able to do the work of forty employees.
- Implemented extensive automated end-to-end integration testing of a complex GUI application, removing the need for manual QA before launching software.
Technologies: Computer Science, Qt, OpenGL, Augmented Reality (AR), ARToolKit, AR Interfaces
Computer Scientist
2014 - 2015
Adobe
- Launched one of the first mobile photoshop apps, Photoshop Mix, to millions of users.
- Employed as one of the three core engineers on a new app, "Photoshop Fix," which went from MVP to Launch in under a year to millions of users, in dozens of countries, with dozens of languages supported.
- Implemented the first "quick select" tool for mobile apps, which has since become a must-have feature in photo editing apps; we set the standard.
- Implemented the first AI-driven facial editing tool, now commonly seen in Snapchat filters. Using an AI-driven face mesh, built tools to manipulate the mesh.
- Worked with research teams to implement experimental code into production software.
- Built the first in-app customer feedback tool and managed all incoming customer feedback, from bug reports to praise.
Technologies: C++11, C++, Objective-C, Swift, GLSL, OpenGL, 3D Games, 3D Graphics, Graphics, Core Graphics, Agile Project Management, Software Project Management
Experience
Ranked Choice Voting Visualization Website
https://fairvote.org/how-to-display-rcv-election-results/RCV is a better way to run elections, but the results can be hard to understand, which is why good visualizations are crucial. RCVis has become the de-facto standard in all USA RCV elections and has been used to inform the visualizations used by NYT, WaPo, and Financial Times. The link below shows FairVote's endorsement of RCVis.
Dashcam for Your Bike
https://dashcam.bikeAn app that brings GoPro-quality technology onto the smartphone, allowing bicyclists to record their bike ride in case of a crash. Through a partnership with the City of Pittsburgh, app users can also report any hazards they encounter on their ride to the City of Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh Bicyclist Hazard Map
https://dashcam.bike/maps/In collaboration with the City of Pittsburgh, as part of Dashcam for your Bike, we have created a map of hazards encountered by bicyclists using the Dashcam App while riding a bike in Pittsburgh. The map is available to the public and city officials, who use it to determine where to improve city infrastructure.
UberCheats
https://www.wired.com/story/gig-workers-gather-data-check-algorithm-math/UberCheats is a way to detect if Uber drivers and couriers were underpaid due to a bug in Uber's distance calculation algorithm. This project was featured in Wired, Wall Street Journal, and Vice. We focused on privacy, and the data was never uploaded to servers. It used a Chrome Extension that analyzed your Uber statements, parsed out how much Uber paid you and for what distance it paid you, then compared that data to Google Maps' Distance API to determine if they miscalculated the distance you traveled.
UberCheats can automatically parse thousands of trips at once, so a user could open their weekly statement and, within seconds, see a list of all trips they were underpaid for. They could then call Uber support, cite each list, and have all the data necessary to get paid correctly.
UberCheats can automatically parse thousands of trips at once, so a user could open their weekly statement and, within seconds, see a list of all trips they were underpaid for. They could then call Uber support, cite each list, and have all the data necessary to get paid correctly.
ARCSim Cloth Simulation Library
http://graphics.berkeley.edu/resources/ARCSim/I was the lead author of this cloth simulation library used by thousands worldwide and the author of the corresponding academic paper published at SIGGRAPH Asia. I gave the talk in Singapore, introducing the paper to several hundred of my colleagues in computer graphics.
ARCSim uses finite element simulation with an adaptive triangle mesh: it predicts where the cloth needs more resolution based on several properties, including proximity to a collision, compression, and stretch, and adds that resolution before it is required.
ARCSim uses finite element simulation with an adaptive triangle mesh: it predicts where the cloth needs more resolution based on several properties, including proximity to a collision, compression, and stretch, and adds that resolution before it is required.
Education
2011 - 2014
Master's Degree in Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley - Berkeley, California, USA
2009 - 2011
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
University of California, Santa Cruz - Santa Cruz, California, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
D3.js, OpenGL, Node.js, iOS API, Core Graphics
Tools
Vim Text Editor, OpenSceneGraph, MeshLab, ARToolKit
Languages
C++, Python, C++17, C++11, Python 3, C#, C, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Objective-C, Swift, GLSL
Frameworks
Qt 5, Qt, Django, Unity, Unity3D
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile, Agile Project Management, Testing
Platforms
Heroku, Mapbox, Firebase, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Other
Computer Science, Computer Graphics, 3D Graphics, Qt 4, Scrum Master, Agile Sprints, Agile Leadership, Software Project Management, Technical Project Management, Lean Project Management, Product Management, Apps, App Design, App UX, Mobile Apps, UI Testing, UX Testing, GUI Testing, QA Testing, Unity3D Native Plugin Interface, Augmented Reality (AR), Clothing, Linear Algebra, AR Interfaces, User Experience (UX), App UI, iOS Camera, iOS Video, Chrome Extensions, Finite Element Method (FEM), Mesh Optimization, 3D Games, Graphics
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