Imitating アンパンマン near Bandai museum in Tokyo

Welcome! I'm Arman. In June'12 I graduated with MSE in Computer Science from Princeton where I was working with Prof. Andrea LaPaugh on recommender systems, data analysis and social computing. Some of my non-research interests are start-ups, entrepreneurship, life hacking, Japanese language, competitive programming, kung-fu movies, Zen, martial arts.

My mission: Honestly expressing oneself through creativity, continuous learning and growth.
My motto: "To know and not to do is yet not to know" (Lao Tzu)

NEW - What am I up to these days? Building Collections - Finder for the Cloud!
Social: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
My interviews with founders: Princeton Startup TV
My essays (in Russian)
My aphorisms (since 2003)
Blog on Yvision (also in Russian)
No Water, No Moon
Blogs I occasionally read: links
Email: my twitter handle @ gmail dot com

Web Projects

• Dewey - the place to share the web content that matters to us: the great things we've read and written. Built in 2 months with Minqi Jiang and Peter Zakin during the eLab program. Summer, 2012. Princeton, NJ
• Papers for the Masses - explore the scientific papers in different areas of Computer Science. The big vision is to match papers with blog posts which discuss and explain them by example without hiding behind jargon.
• BroDate - interest-based video chat matchup. You can think of it as StumbleUpon for people. Built at Princeton Startup Weekend. November 2011, Princeton.
• Tokoro - itinerary planning web app. Given the city generates the diverse (food, drinks, shops, coffee, arts, outdoors) sequence of popular venues keeping the distance travelled as short as possible. Built at Facebook Hackathon and hackNY, Fall 2011, Princeton & NYC.
• Social Ranking: generates ranklists of universities, companies, restaurants, etc. using the intelligence of the social web (mainly, Twitter). Built with Momchil Tomov at PennApps Data Hackathon, Fall 2011, University of Pennsylvania.
• Bunny - learning Japanese with example sentences. Implemented word segmentation, part of speech tagging, classification of sentences into grammar buckets. Built in May 2011 for the Information Retrieval course.
• iLike - share favorite stuff and get personal recommendations. Abandoned. Built with Zhanibek Datbayev in a single night of December 2008.

With Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare

Princeton & KBTU teams at ACM ICPC World Finals 2011

Competitive Programming

• 42nd place at ACM ICPC World Finals. Coach aka tourist :). May, 2011. Orlando, FL.
• Honorable mention at ACM ICPC World Finals (100 out of 7,109 teams qualified), April 2009. Contestant. Stockholm, Sweden.
• 2nd place (out of 48 teams) at the Greater NY ACM Regional Contest, October, 2010. Rutgers, NJ.
• 7th place (out of 113 teams) at the ECNA ACM Regional Contest, October, 2009. Cincinnati, OH.
• 4th place (out of 123 teams) at the ECNA ACM Regional Contest, October, 2008. Cincinnati, OH.
• TopCoder: 1st place (out of 646 contestants) in Single Round Match (SRM) 370 (Div II), 2nd place (out of 761) in SRM 428 (Div II), 124th place (out of 800) in SRM 466 (Div I)
• Petrozavodsk Programming Contests Training Camp. Summer 2009. Karelia, Russia.
• Solved problems at UVa Online Judge
• ProjectEuler.net: solved 57 consecutive problems in a week of December 2008.
• Other sites where I used to solve problems: USACO Training Gateway (stopped in the middle of Section 4), acm.sgu.ru (I was active in May 2009), Google Code Jam (2008, 2009), acm.timus.ru, Codeforces

Media Appearances

• 02/22/13 Princeton Alumni Weekly. 'Ditch the furniture; line up the laptops. The lives of young entrepreneurs' Link
• 12/09/12 My blog was given 'The Best Educational Blog of 2012' award by Yvision (in Russian). Link
• 12/14/11 My video interview to YVision (in Russian). Link
• 10/06/11 Yvision: IT Education: insider's view (in Russian). Link
• 09/05/11 The New Yorker Profile for Timothy Ferriss. "A young man from Kazakhstan addressed Ferriss in Japanese before striking a kickboxing pose for the camera". Link
• 04/15/11 University Press Club: IN PRINT: Princeton Coders #Winning. Link
• 04/13/11 HuffingPost Tech: Students Compete to Be Top in Tech at Google Games. Link
• 04/11/11 Fast Company: Epic Geek-Off Seeks Future Googlers. Link
• 09/28/10 News at Princeton: Photo contest: 'How I spent my summer vacation'. Link
• 06/01/10 Insights Magazine Spring 2010: Competitive Coding. Link
• 12/18/09 Amazon Names Ninja Coder Design Contest Winner. Link
• 04/14/09 Purdue Exponent: Students travel to Sweden for programming contest. Link
• 12/09/08 Purdue Cheburashka to Compete in Stockholm. Link
• 11/03/08 Purdue Places 3rd in ACM Regional Programming Contest. Link

With Tim Ferriss after High-Tech Entrepreneurship class

Princeton Startup TV: David Lieb, CEO and co-founder of Bump

Life Hacking Projects

• Princeton Startup TV: my conversations with founders
• Nameless @ Princeton is the podcast where me and my guest (both Princeton students) recommend top 3 books, top 3 sites, top 3 people and more. Previous episodes: #4 with Shotaro Makisumi, #3 with Dominic Kao, #2 with Ulan Karazhigitov (in Russian), #1 with Zhanat Abylkassym (in Russian).
• June-July 2011. Hacking Japanese. 'Princeton in Ishikawa' program in Kanazawa, Japan
• Traveling. Countries visited: Bahamas, Canada, Hungary, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, USA.

Me At Princeton

• Building Dewey with friends (Peter Zakin and Minqi Jiang) at Keller Center's eLab startup launchpad.
• Classes I took: 'COS 402 Artificial Intelligence' (Fall 2010, taught by Rob Schapire), 'COS 487 Theory of Computation' (Fall 2010, Sanjeev Arora), 'ELE 491 High-Tech Entrepreneurship' (Fall 2010, Ed Zschau), 'COS 448 Innovating Across Technology, Business, & Markets' (Spring 2011, JP Singh), 'COS 701 Information Retrieval' (Spring 2011, Andrea LaPaugh), 'COS 597B The Future of the Book' (Fall 2011, Adam Finkelstein), 'COS 518 Advanced Computer Systems' (Fall 2011, Michael Freedman), 'COS 424 Interacting with Data' (Spring 2012, David Blei), 'Elementary Japanese I-II' (Fall 2010, Spring 2011), 'Intermediate Japanese I-II' (Summer 2011), 'Advanced Japanese I' (Fall 2011, Rie Tameyori)
• Teaching Assistant: COS 109 (Computers in Our World, Andrea LaPaugh, Fall 2010), COS 126 (Introduction to Computer Science, Kevin Wayne, Spring 2011): materials from my precepts, COS 231 (Integrated Science, Robert Sedgewick, Fall 2011), COS 234 (Integrated Science, Olga Troyanskaya, Spring 2012)
• Princeton Entrepreneurship Club: director of 'Startup TV' project
• Princeton Taekwondo Club
• Princeton Juggling Club

With Meg Whitman, CEO of HP, ex-CEO of eBay