About
I’m Armin, an engineer and researcher based in Montréal. I’m interested in how technology shapes what people notice, learn, make, and share. My work often sits around machine learning and culture, but I’m equally drawn to photography, music, design, languages, and small experiments that do not fit neatly into a job title.
This website is a personal archive rather than a polished feed. Learning / Building collects work, reading, and ideas in progress. Seeing / Listening holds photographs and sounds. The two sections are meant to overlap: things I study often become things I make, and things I notice often change what I want to study.
I speak Persian, English, and French, and I’m learning German. I love learning languages. I also understand a little Arabic and Turkish/Azerbaijani, sometimes enough to make a joke.
Curriculum vitae
Experience
Shopify, Ads & Recommendations
Applied ML Engineer II · Montréal · May 2025–present
- Build and improve large-scale recommendation systems.
- Develop the tools and evaluation methods that help teams understand how those systems behave for real people.
Mila, Quebec AI Institute
Responsible AI Researcher · Montréal · January 2023–April 2025
- Researched responsible and culturally aware recommendation systems.
- Studied how algorithms affect discoverability, representation, and feedback loops.
Cafe Bazaar, Balad Maps
Data Scientist · Tehran · 2020–2022
- Built search and personalization systems for maps used by millions of people.
- Worked on recommendations, query correction, and understanding changing search patterns.
Education
Université de Montréal, Mila
MSc in Computer Science · AI specialization
Thesis: Mitigating Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems with a Cultural Lens
Sharif University of Technology
BSc in Computer Engineering · GPA 3.96/4.0
Thesis: Investigating Membership Inference Attacks on Recommender Systems
Publications and talks
- Embedding Cultural Diversity in Prototype-based Recommender Systems. Full paper, 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2025). Read the paper.
- Tidying Up the Conversational Recommender Systems’ Biases. Oral presentation, Knowledge-aware and Conversational Recommender Systems Workshop at ACM RecSys 2023. Read the paper.
- A Tutorial on Fairness in Machine Learning. Oral presentation for Mila’s Trustworthy and Responsible AI Learning program, 2023.
Earlier research
- Explored audio and MIDI style transfer for auditory feedback in robot-assisted surgery at the Technical University of Munich.
- Worked on optical music recognition for handwritten scores at TU Wien.
- Researched visual domain adaptation and reinforcement learning for robot navigation at Sharif University of Technology.
- Built a few-shot humpback-whale identification system during the Rahnema College machine-learning program.
Tools and areas of practice
- Research and engineering: recommendation systems, responsible AI, cultural discoverability, machine learning, and data systems.
- Creative practice: photography, sound, music, writing, and small web experiments.
Selected awards
- Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship (C$60,000).
- Full Funding for Research Master’s Studies, Mila Quebec AI Institute (C$31,000 per year; 2 years).
- Residency Grant, co-creating with AI and arts (C$5,000).
- Bourse en intelligence artificielle des ESP, Université de Montréal (C$5,000).
- Scholarship for Foreign Master’s Students, DIRO, Université de Montréal (C$4,000).
- Ministry of Higher Education Scholarship for International Students, DIRO, Université de Montréal (C$3,000).
- Travel Grant, Responsible AI track, Canadian AI 2024 (NSERC; C$1,160).
- Travel Grant, 2nd IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (US$1,000).
- International Undergraduate Excellence Award, CAMP, Technical University of Munich (€5,000).
- Grant for Outstanding Academic Success, National Elites Foundation (2017).
- Ranked 24th nationwide (out of approximately 200,000) and 1st regionwide (out of approximately 40,000) in the 2017 Mathematics Entrance Exam.