USAF-MIT AI ACCELERATOR

“ I ’ m first generation everything ,” says TSgt . Armando Cabrera , US Air Force . “ First generation American , first in my family to graduate high school , college and first to join the military .” Having graduated with a Bachelor ’ s in Mechanical Engineering , and after some time struggling to find a job , Cabrera joined the Air Force for

Geospatial Intelligence . “ I worked really hard in the Air Force technical school and graduated as a distinguished graduate .”

Having demonstrated his potential , Cabrera was eventually selected for a program usually reserved for officers to be sent to Amazon to learn best practices for machine learning . “ I was there for a year , playing two kinds of roles . First , I was a student taking all

106

Title : AI Flight Chief Location : United States

Industry : Academia and Defense

Tech . Sgt . Armando Cabrera is the flight chief for the USAF-MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator ’ s Multimodal Vision for Synthetic Aperature Radar ( MV4SAR ) project . Carbrera earned his B . S . in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern California and worked as a geospatial intelligence analyst for the Air Force before being accepted as one of the first enlisted members into the Education with Industry program . Cabrera was assigned to Amazon for a year , and was the first DoD employee to complete Amazon ’ s Machine Learning Education University . Currently , he is a lead researcher for SAR to EO image translation , and is a content developer in AI education for MIT Lincoln Lab .

DECEMBER 2020