Marius Niță

Email Me

I've worked in a variety of technology areas including developer tools, augmented reality, and computer vision. I was the founding engineer @ headspin.io where I built next-level app testing tools and helped build a cool company and great eng team.

Here's a sample of projects I've worked on:

Hyperdiv
Current
I'm building an app framework that simplifies the building of reactive full-stack web applications, by using a single language, Python, with no boilerplate and tool complexity.

https://hyperdiv.io

HeadSpin
2015-2021

HeadSpin runs user tests at scale on browsers and mobile devices on our own worldwide-distributed hardware infrastructure. Our analysis platform extracts intelligence from captured test data to help teams improve the quality of their apps for a global audience. I joined HeadSpin as a founding engineer and played major roles in developing the product and team.

headspin.ioPatents

Simtable
2014-2015

Simtable is a wildfire simulation platform used to train fire fighters and educate the public. I designed and built the Simtable UI, which is projected into a physical sandbox and controlled using a laser pointer. I implemented binary coded structured light for accurate pointing and simulation over hand-sculpted terrain.

Featured on 60 MinutesTable Setup Video (UI/laser pointer around 5:05)

Skate
2014-2015

Skate is a DoE-funded project that uses computer vision to digitize analog seismograms captured during the cold war. Benny Lichtner and I designed and built the seismogram editor that lets you view and manually correct the data, with advice from Andy Bartlett and Stephen Guerin.

Paper (Seismological Research Letters 2018)

Globe
2012-2013

Globe is a research social network for land scientists, built by University of Maryland. I co-designed and built the v1 client app for Globe in collaboration with Matt Schmill, Erle Ellis, others from UMBC, and The Other Firm.

Paper about Globe (CHI 13)

Columbia River Habitat Restoration
2011-2012

As a DoE subcontractor, I worked with Sitka to build a geospatial/maps architecture to track environmental restoration projects in the Columbia River Estuary. These projects offset the negative environmental impact of hydropower.

Layers
2010 • graduate research

I developed a text editor UI that conceptualizes text diffs (e.g., git branches) as stacked layers a la Photoshop, that you can turn on and off in the UI.

Tech Report (Draft)

Twinning
2008-2010 • graduate research

David Notkin and I created Twinning, a program transformation system that lets you specify transformations by example. I showed how a Facebook client app can be rapidly built with Twinning by largely reusing an existing Twitter client app.

Paper (ICSE 10)Slides

Whitebox Fuzzing
2008 • graduate internship

I interned on the Sage project at Microsoft, working on extending whitebox fuzzing to distributed systems, with Michael Y. Levin and Patrice Godefroid.

C Type Theory
2005-2008 • graduate research

I worked with Dan Grossman and Craig Chambers to develop a type theory that explains what it means for a C type to be portable, for a subset of C. Dan and I also built an extension for C that spares you from writing code N times for each of N target platforms. Instead, you write the code once and the other N-1 code variants are generated.

Paper (POPL 08)Tech ReportSlides

Paper (CC 08)Slides

Masters ThesisSlides

Functional Logic Programming
2003-2005 • undergraduate research

While an undergrad student at Portland State, I built a generational garbage collector for a functional logic language with breadth-first (parallel) search while advised by Andrew Tolmach. I also implemented monadic IO in a VM for a Haskell-like functional logic language in collaboration with Sergio Antoy.

Paper (ICFP 04)

Honours ThesisSlides

Openbox
2001-2004

Openbox is a sweet Linux window manager built by Dana Jansens. I mainly trolled the #openbox IRC channel, possibly contributing some code, but mainly memes, and am the proud owner of the domain name.

openbox.org

Fun facts: I'm an avid hiker and love to roam the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. I'm also a visual artist and amateur musician. I was born in Craiova, Romania and have lived in Portland, Seattle, San Franciso, San Mateo, and Santa Fe.