Abiel Almonte’s career in tech took off even before he’d set foot in his first class at FIU’s College of Engineering and Computing. Rather than wait for the fall semester to figure out where he fit in, he spent the summer scouting out labs that caught his interest and soon landed a spot in the Applied Research Center before many of his classmates had even ordered their textbooks.
“I felt like the Applied Research Center was my sandbox,” he says. “I developed coding skills and cultivated an interest in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and machine learning. I got very deep into the technical aspects, and I also learned how to interact with other peers and colleagues.”
The senior computer engineering major spent a year and a half in the lab, honing his skills and building a foundation that would carry him to two of the biggest names in tech. Last year, he spent his summer as a software engineering intern at NVIDIA in Santa Clara, California. This summer, he returned to California to completed a machine learning internship with Apple in Cupertino.
“At NVIDIA, I was part of a team working on how large language models get deployed and synch across services,” he says. “It gave me experience working in a formal, software engineering environment and collaborating to solve problems at scale.”
At Apple, Almonte worked on in-home devices, developing models that run faster and more efficiently on Apple’s on-device accelerators.
“We are working on enabling these programs to run on wearables, like your watch. Improving Apple’s smallest neural engines is exciting and fun, and I feel like I am the right person for the job,” he says.
Almonte attended the School for Advanced Studies on the Kendall campus of Miami Dade College. He graduated in 2023 with both his high school diploma and an Associate in Arts degree from the college.
At the Spring 2026 College of Engineering & Computing Senior Design Showcase, his “flash-recon” project won the award for most innovative for its real-time technology that generates a live 3D map of an environment from a single camera feed. The system has potential applications in navigation, search and rescue and autonomous vehicles.
He is also the student author on “Adversarial AI Training to Mitigate Cyber Attacks,” an early interest of his. It was published in the 2025 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Testing.
“Abiel has demonstrated exceptional self-motivation across the AI engineering stack,” says Himanshu Upadhyay, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. “He has a proven ability to tackle deep-tech bottlenecks. Ultimately, his work bridges the gap between raw hardware acceleration and advanced application deployment.”
Outside the lab, Almonte hikes, writes a blog and continues to contemplate how to make machines run faster, smarter and closer to the humans they’re built to serve.
