• 2020 STEM Hero •

Technical Sgt. Armando Cabrera did not allow a few poor decisions that he made in his youth prevent him from forging forward to a successful career as Artificial Intelligence Accelerator Flight Chief for the U.S. Air Force.

Even though the Air Force turned down his application to Officer’s Training school after the Los Angeles-born Cabrera graduated from USC with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, he enlisted anyway.

Through hard work, tenacity, intelligence, and determination, Sgt. Cabrera worked his way through the ranks to become the noncommissioned officer in charge of the U.S. Air Force/MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator.

He’s one of two enlisted Airmen in the Air Force developing Artificial Intelligence for warfighters and is building and teaching a Data Analytics course for cadets at the Air Force Academy. Sgt. Cabrera’s research at MIT’s Computer Science & A.I. and Lincoln Laboratories focuses on applying Artificial Intelligence to multi-modal synthetic aperture radar images.

Selected to be the first enlisted Airmen to attend the Education with Industry program with Amazon – an honor historically reserved for officers – Sgt. Cabrera was also the first Department of Defense member to attend Amazon’s Machine Learning University – an Amazon graduate-level internal school for senior engineers.