Reflections on a Decade at Apple

Recently celebrating a work anniversary

Back at university, I made a decision, or rather a decision was made for me because I fell in love.

I fell in love with image processing and computer vision. I was so excited and enthralled, but it wasn’t such a great idea at the time given the lack of jobs. Most jobs in the field were government jobs, and the US had two wars going on, so I wasn’t keen on government work that could involve violence.

There was hope for the future, though…

I knew the future would see cameras in all sorts of places of all sorts of sizes doing all sorts of things. At the time, the field of computer vision seemed a bit simpler with a few pillar problems:

1. Autonomous vehicles
2. Biometric recognition from imaging
3. Medical image processing

There wasn’t funding outside of these, and that’s how I ended up doing 3D face recognition. I could name most of experts in the field and knew half of them.

Winter 2014 had a lot of snow days. The company I worked for after grad school would call off work when the government called of for snow. We had 8 days that year, and this was before working from home was a thing.

Whatever the case, I had been keeping track of people new to the company and leaving the company. There were quite a few signs that the company was going to go under, so I started looking. Initially, just in Pittsburgh because my wife’s family was from there.

At that time, there were at most 5 computer vision jobs open a year throughout the country. The Pittsburgh job market was so dominated by CMU that I didn’t have much chance. Finally, my wife suggested I look elsewhere just in case I wasn’t as smart and capable as I thought I would.

Jokes on you…

Two months later,

California

here

we

come.

The past tens years saw things I didn’t expect on such a timeline. I didn’t think face recognition would be solved until after the mid-2020’s, but I helped launch Face ID in 2017.

I didn’t think the machine learning/computer vision job market would get so hot so quickly either. I was amazed and scared because this was unknown territory. This was what I wanted to come true back in school.

My mindset had shifted from one of trying to achieve peak excellence (winning) to one of service. As I got more into the idea of being helpful to others without concern for my own reward, I found unexpectedly interesting projects.

I also discovered Apple’s best product is not a phone, tablet, watch, or even a headset. Apple is the best at producing people of character. I’m more proud of the character of the people who I have managed and mentored than anything else as well as my own character.

Here are the Top Ten products/features I’ve worked on:

1. Background Heart Rate (Watch), high/low heart rate alerts
2. Face ID (iPhone/iPad)
3. People Detection for Blind Users (Lidar versions of iPhone/iPad)
4. Wrist Detection (Watch)
5. Outside Door Detection for Blind Users (Lidar versions of iPhone/iPad)
6. Optic ID (Vision Pro)
7. Roomscan API (Lidar versions of iPhone/iPad)
8. Gaze/Pinch (Vision Pro)
9. Eye Tracking for Accessibility (iPhone/iPad)
10. …

Ten years is a long time, and I’m excited to see what comes next.