Why they are on the map
Senior author on designer-feedback UI-generation paper (CHI 2026) source — evidence dated 2026-02
Shapes what 'good data' means.
How Apple Foundation Models (AFM) buys data
AFM 2025 report (Jul 2025): collected large text-image preference data to train a reward model; human graders disagree on 20-30% of pairs; 'internal and external' human eval, vendors unnamed. AFM v3 (Jun 2026) uses in-house human graders. Apple researchers (CHI 2026) collected 1,500 designer annotations from 21 internal designers to fine-tune UI-generation models - direct design-feedback data work.
Dec 2025: Giannandrea retired; Amar Subramanya (VP AI) under Craig Federighi runs AFM, ML research and safety; Zhifeng Chen leads the foundation-models team. Human grading appears in-house; HCI/UI research group in Seattle (Nichols, Barik, Swearngin).
This person was mapped in pass 1. Career, what they have said on the record, interviews, connections, why they matter to us and how to reach them are added in pass 2, which starts with tier A.