Priyan Vaithilingam

Research Scientist, Apple 


        

      


      
    


    

      

        
About

        

          I am a Research Scientist in the
          AI/ML
          group at Apple, working on intelligent user interfaces. I received my
          Ph.D. from Harvard, where I was advised by
          Prof. Elena Glassman
          at the
          Variation Lab.
          My research lies in the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, and
          Software Engineering.
        

        

          Prior to this, I was a Master's Student at UCSD,
          where I worked with
          Prof. Philip Guo
          at the
          UCSD Design Lab.
          I was also fortunate to work in
          Microsoft Research
          India as a Research Fellow for two years, where I worked on projects related to
          information retrieval, developer tools, and programming accessibility.
        

        

          CV
              
          Google Scholar
              
          LinkedIn
        

      


      

        
Publications

        

          Related works by topic 
          

          
Click a topic or paper to see relationships.

          

          

        

        

          The Way We Notice, That's What Really Matters: Instantiating UI Components with Distinguishing Variations

          CHI 2026

          Priyan Vaithilingam, Alan Leung, Jeffrey Nichols, Titus Barik

          [acm] |
          [pdf] |
          [apple]
        

        

          Semantic Commit: Helping Users Update Intent Specifications for AI Memory at Scale

          UIST 2025

          Priyan Vaithilingam, Munyeong Kim, Frida-Cecilia Acosta-Parenteau, Daniel Lee, Amine Mhedhbi, Elena L. Glassman, Ian Arawjo

          [acm] |
          [pdf]
        

        

          Imagining a Future of Designing with AI: Dynamic Grounding, Constructive Negotiation, and Sustainable Motivation

          DIS 2024

          Priyan Vaithilingam, Ian Arawjo, Elena L Glassman

          [acm] |
          [pdf]
        

        

          DynaVis: Dynamically Synthesized UI Widgets for Visualization Editing

          Best Paper CHI 2024

          Priyan Vaithilingam, Elena L Glassman, Jeevana Priya Inala, Chenglong Wang

          [acm] |
          [pdf] |
          [microsoft]
        

        

          ChainForge: A Visual Toolkit for Prompt Engineering and LLM Hypothesis Testing

          Honorable Mention CHI 2024

          Ian Arawjo, Chelse Swoopes, Priyan Vaithilingam, Elena L Glassman, Martin Wattenberg

          [acm] |
          [pdf] |
          [try it]
        

        

          Amortizing Pragmatic Program Synthesis with Rankings

          ICML 2024

          Yewen Pu, Saujas Vaduguru, Priyan Vaithilingam, Elena L Glassman, Daniel Fried

          [acm] |
          [pdf]
        

        

          ProtoGraph: A Non-Expert Toolkit for Creating Animated Graphs

          IEEE VIS 2023

          Malchiel Rodrigues, Joel Dapello, Priyan Vaithilingam, Carolina Nobre, Johanna Beyer

          [ieee] |
          [pdf]
        

        

          Towards More Effective AI-Assisted Programming: A Systematic Design Exploration to Improve Visual Studio IntelliCode's User Experience

          ICSE-SEIP 2023

          Priyan Vaithilingam, Elena L Glassman, Peter Groenwegen, Sumit Gulwani, Austin Z. Henley, Rohan Malpani, David Pugh, Arjun Radhakrishna, Gustavo Soares, Joey Wang, Aaron Yim

          [acm] |
          [pdf] |
          [microsoft]
        

        

          Expectation vs. Experience: Evaluating the Usability of Code Generation Tools Powered by Large Language Models

          CHI LBW 2022

          Priyan Vaithilingam, Tianyi Zhang, Elena L Glassman

          [acm] |
          [pdf]
        

        

          Assuage: Assembly Synthesis Using A Guided Exploration

          UIST 2021

          Jingmei Hu, Priyan Vaithilingam, Stephen Chong, Margo Seltzer, Elena L Glassman

          [acm] |
          [pdf]
        

        

          Interpretable Program Synthesis

          CHI 2021

          Tianyi Zhang, Zhiyang Chen, Yuanli Zhu, Priyan Vaithilingam, Xinyu Wang, Elena L Glassman

          [acm] |
          [pdf]
        

        

          Papercode: Generating Paper-Based User Interfaces for Code Review, Annotation, and Teaching

          UIST Poster 2020

          Priyan Vaithilingam, Julia M. Markel, Philip J. Guo

          [acm] |
          [pdf] |
          [poster]
        

        

          Bespoke: Interactively Synthesizing Custom GUIs from Command-Line Applications By Demonstration

          UIST 2019

          Priyan Vaithilingam, Philip J. Guo

          [acm] |
          [pdf]
        

        

          CodeTalk: Improving Programming Environment Accessibility for Visually Impaired Developers

          Honorable Mention CHI 2018

          Venkatesh Potluri, Priyan Vaithilingam, Suresh Parthasarathy, Vidhya Reddy, Manohar Swaminathan, Gopal Srinivasa

          [acm] |
          [pdf] |
          [microsoft]
        

      


      

        
Experience

        
    
          
  • 
            
    ML Research Scientist, Apple Current
    
            
    Apple · Apr 2025 - Present, Seattle USA
    
          
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  • 
            
    Research Intern, Microsoft Research
    
            
    MSR VIDA · May 2024 - Aug 2024, Redmond USA
    
          
    • 
          
  • 
            
    Research Intern, Microsoft Research
    
            
    MSR VIDA · May 2023 - Aug 2023, Redmond USA
    
          
    • 
          
  • 
            
    Research Intern, Microsoft Research
    
            
    Microsoft PROSE · Sep 2021 - Aug 2022, Remote
    
          
    • 
          
  • 
            
    Research Fellow, Microsoft Research India
    
            
    Applied Sciences and Engineering · Mar 2016 - Jul 2018, Bengaluru India
    
          
    • 
          
  • 
            
    Software Engineer, Microsoft India
    
            
    MS IDC · Jun 2015 - Mar 2016, Hyderabad India
    
          
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Contact

        
Personal Email: priyanmuthu at gmail dot com