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Aaron Zinman
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Machine Learning Engineering Manager
Apple, Inc.
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http://azinman.com
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San Francisco, CA
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mobile
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785-AZINMAN
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Charismatic full-stack engineer and 0-to-1 specialist. Combines deep technical ability with design sensibility and user empathy to find the right problems, prototype relentlessly, and ship. Most at home collaborating in the space between research and product.
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Education
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PhD, Media Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006 - 2011
Groups: Sociable Media Group (2006-2009); Fluid Interfaces (2009-2011)
GPA: 5.00 / 5.00
Thesis: Me, Myself, and My Hyperego: Understanding People Through the Aggregation of Their Digital Footprints
Thesis Advisors: Judith Donath & Pattie Maes, Ryan Rifkin, William (Bill) J. Mitchell
General Exams Committee: Judith Donath, Andrew McCallum, Jason Kaufman
SM, Media Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004 - 2006
Group: Sociable Media Group
GPA: 5.00 / 5.00
Thesis: RadioActive: Enabling Large-Scale Asynchronous Audio Discussions on Mobile Devices
Thesis Advisors: Judith Donath, Chris Schmandt, Walter Bender
BS, Cognitive Science with Specialization in Computation
University of California, San Diego, 1999 - 2004
Cognitive & Computer Science GPA: 3.59 / 4.00
Honors Thesis: Personal Metadata: Order from Clutter
Honors Thesis Advisors: David Kirsh, John Batali, and Dan Bauer
Year abroad studying Computer Science
University of Birmingham, England, 2001-2002
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Employment
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Machine Learning Engineering Manager, 2025 - Present
Apple, Cupertino, CA
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Leading team working on future Apple experiences. Conceived and lead team prototyping for major and minor experiences that are expected to ship in the next set of Apple OS releases, with a strong focus on intelligence mixed with HCI. Proved some more modern intelligence techniques can never be safely used in specific input-oriented experiences, saving production teams much time and resources. Cross functional efforts across multiple SWE teams and the design studio. Until things ship I can't really go into detail, sorry.
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Staff Machine Learning Engineer, 2023 - 2025
Apple, Cupertino, CA
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Vision + design + AI + tech lead on new future-looking projects. Built cross-functional collaboration to drive major changes in AI+UX that are still upcoming.
Conceived, designed, and project managed the cross-functional roll out of internal infrastructure to faciliate private & secure prototyping of intelligence features. I wish I could say more here and provide visuals, but alas.
Worked on the new Visual Intelligence feature from prototype to keynote filming with small cross-functional team. Helped with UI, Google Image Search, overall architecture.
Major contributor of comps presented to leadership for Apple Intelligence system experience features including notification and messages summarization, and writing tools.
Helped Messages and other cross-functional teams ship the overhaul of Stickers in iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma. Major contributor to architecture of the app experience involving many sub-components of the OS and system frameworks, wrote the Recents implementation, and many more miscellaneous tasks to get it over the finish line.
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Senior Software Engineer, 2022 - 2023
Apple, Cupertino, CA
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Working in the Interactive System Experience Incubation team. Investigating future experiences integrating UX & Machine Learning on the 5+ year scale. Spearheaded, designed, and built Meetbot, an internal tool that has helped thousands of Apple employees to easily network inside the company.
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Senior Software Engineer, 2019 - 2022
Apple, Cupertino, CA
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Siri Proactive Team in Intelligent System Experience. R&D for future ML-driven system experiences. Helped the SpringBoard shipped major changes to the Lock Screen iOS 16 by rewriting the Sleep focus experience.
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Senior Prototype Engineer, 2018 - 2019
Apple, Cupertino, CA
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Experience Prototyping (XP) team in Technology Development Group. Lead, architected, and designed efforts around contextual-awareness with spatial computing projects. Filed five patents for innovation, three granted as of February 2026.
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(Senior) Software Engineer, 2016 - 2017
Ginger.io, San Francisco, CA
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Software engineer working across the full-stack (Python/Django, infrastructure, Postgres and Mysql, and mobile). Headed iOS and brought the app to 100% crash-free within 2 months, averaging 99.5+% crash-free sessions since. Built fundamental infrastructure and algorithms for Data Science, and a key contributor to engineering workflow, process, and general approach.
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iOS Consultant, 2015 - 2016
Google, Mountain View, CA
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Created the iOS implementation of Google's Vanadium project, an open-source library to ease the creation of distributed peer-to-peer apps. Contributed a patch to Golang's linker to support c-archives on the iOS 64-bit simulator.
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CEO and Co-founder, 2012 - 2015
Empirical Interfaces Inc., San Francisco, CA
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Co-founded Empirical with Greg Elliott, having raised $1MM from Floodgate, Greylock, Ben Ling and Scott Belsky to create novel social apps incorporating AI.
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Aaron Zinman LLC, 2011 - 2012
Cambridge, MA
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iOS Consulting for companies such as MIT Press.
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Software Engineering Intern, 2008
Google, Cambridge, MA
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Worked with Ryan Rifkin to create a new way to browse blogs. Conceptualized the product, investigated the requirements, submitted 30+ design visions, collaborated with multiple teams across Google, and built the main guts.
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Research Intern, 2007
IBM Research, T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY
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Worked with Chandra Narayanaswami and Danny Soroker in the Technologies for Next Generation Pervasive Services group. Realized multiple prototypes of a research project (OrgMaps).
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Research Staff, 2001 - 2004
Interactive Cognition Lab, UC San Diego
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Senior web engineer building dynamic web sites using ASP, IIS, and MS SQL for E-Learning and distributed cognition research.
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Issued Patents
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US-11973894-B2: Utilizing context information with an electronic device. Issued Apr 30, 2024
US 11438452: Propagating context information in a privacy preserving manner. Issued Sep 6, 2022
US 11361473: Including a physical object based on context. Issued Jun 14, 2022
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Publications
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Donath J., Dragulescu, A., Zinman A., Viégas, F., and Xiong, R. "Data Portraits." Leonardo 43.4 (2010): 375-383. Project MUSE.
Zinman A., and Fritz, D. Data Portraiture and Topic Models. In Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2009), Workshop on Applications for Topic Models: Text and Beyond. Whistler, BC, Canada. December 11th, 2009.
Coffman, D., Soroker, D., Narayanaswami, C., and Zinman, A. A Client-Server Architecture for State-Dependent Dynamic Visualizations on the Web. Submitted for review to the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010), Raleigh, NC.
Zinman A., and Donath, J. Signs: Increasing Expression and Clarity in Instant Messaging. In Proceedings of HICSS 2009.
Soroker, D., Zinman, A., Narayanaswami, C. Organizational Maps and Mashups. IBM Technical Report RC24551, Watson, 05/09/2008.
Zinman, A., Donath, J. "Is Britney Spears Spam?" In Proceedings of Fourth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, Mountain View, California, August 2-3, 2007.
Zinman, A., Donath, J. RadioActive: Enabling Persistent Mobile Communication for Groups. Alt.CHI 2007, April 28 - May 3 2007, San Jose, CA
Zinman, A., RadioActive: Enabling Large-Scale Asynchronous Audio Discussions on Mobile Devices. MS Thesis, MIT, 2006.
Zinman, A., Donath, J. Navigating Persistent Audio. In Proceedings of CHI 2006.
Zinman, A., Donath, J. RadioActive: enabling mobile-based audio forums. Workshop, CHI 2005.
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Programming Languages
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Swift, Python, Objective-C, Go, Java, Scala, JavaScript, C, C++, HTML/CSS, SQL
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Awards
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Grand Prize MIT IDEAS Competition for Konbit, 2010
SAIC Fellowship, 2005-2006
UCSD Cognitive Science Honors Society, 2003-2004
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