Hi. I'm Sam Low.

I'm a recent UBC computer science graduate interested in using ML and design for journalism.

Find me on GitHub and Mastodon.

Blogs

Projects

PM Log pmlog.ca

Upon most targets of observation, constructing a live record of everything they've ever said, everywhere they've ever been, and every activity they've ever planned to do is considered rather invasive, weird, and bad.

Fortunately an exception exists regarding the surveillance of "public figures"! Using online sources, PM Log focuses the eye of the machine God upon Canada's 24th Prime Minister: The Right Honourable Mark Joesph Carney.

Diagram of transcription and diarization process. 1) FFmpeg converts the audio to wav. 2) Whisper generates a transcription. 3) SpeechBrain model creates voice embeddings. 4) KMeans clustering identifies voices.

Press conferences published on cpac.ca are transcribed by Whisper and diarization is performed through KMeans clustering on spkrec-ecapa-voxceleb embeddings. Voices from separate press conferences are clustered by proximity and then manually labeled with a speaker.

Press releases from pm.gc.ca are parsed for location, date, time, and content.

Semantic search is possible through an indexing of every line in every transcript and press release with an all-MiniLM-L6-v2 embedding.

Through granularly indexed omniscience in the public activites of the head of executive, a savy journalists can quickly trace Mr. Carney's history of remarks on any subject. The information can be accessed through the web interface, a REST API, GraphQL, and MCP. The code can be found on GitHub.

The Ubyssey ubyssey.ca

The Ubyssey has been covering the University of British Columbia and training the next generation of Canadian journalists since 1918. The newspaper consistently earns national awards. That includes a JHM award for Outstanding Website Design which we won in 2026 while I was lead developer!

I worked on the newspaper's website from 2023 to 2026. Here are some of my favourite contributions!

  • Itdoesn't workday. An elaborate spoof of Workday Student called ItDoesn’tWorkday. It topped the dreaded subreddit for a good period!
  • A liveblogging platform native to our CMS. I barely slept the week we released it but it was SO COOL to see my software open up an entirely new medium of journalism to our newspaper! We used it for live coverage of student union debates and meetings.
  • The homepage. I developed a redesign of our homepage that allowed individual articles and groups of articles to be presented uniquely. It created a lot of possibilities for creativity! This snapshot is a good example.
  • An events calendar that autonomously aggregated and categorized campus events across several sources.
  • A Migration to Google Compute Engine from App Engine. It saved us $500 a month!!!

I also wrote some funny articles for the recently expunged Humour section.

Little tubbdoose on skateboard.