At Apple, Afshin Dehghan ’14MS ’16PhD is on the cutting edge of the newest AI technology and developing some of the most popular and innovative products in the world.
If you’ve used an iPhone, iPad or Apple Vision Pro in the last decade, it’s likely that you have benefitted from AI technology that UCF alumnus Afshin Dehghan ’14MS ’16PhD helped to create.
Dehghan leads an AI team at Apple that is at the forefront of the company’s technology. He guides the research, design and development of some of the world’s most innovative operating systems and products.
He joined Apple nearly 10 years ago, after completing his graduate program in UCF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science — earning both his master’s and Ph.D. in computer science — and working for a Central Florida technology startup.
Finding His Way to UCF
When he started at UCF in 2011, it was about a year before the rebirth of what we now consider the modern AI. “It was an exciting time to be entering the field,” says Dehghan.
He had already completed his undergraduate studies abroad and was taking part in a student exchange program in Lisbon, Portugal, working in a computer vision lab.
That’s when he came across a survey paper authored by Mubarak Shah, founder of UCF’s computer vision program and now director of the UCF Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The paper was on the topic of object tracking, which was also the subject of Dehghan’s internship.
“That paper was my first introduction to UCF’s computer vision program, which was considered one of the top labs in the world. I applied, was honored to be accepted and eventually completed my dissertation on that exact same topic,” he says.
The Path to Innovation
Being part of that lab meant having a front-row seat while AI as we know it began to revolutionize industries, academia and everyday life.
“It can feel like AI appeared overnight. But in reality, it has been building for decades,” Dehghan says. “It actually started in the 1940s, when researchers began asking whether machines could think at all.”
He explains that progress was slow for years, and limited primarily to research labs. But that started to change in 2012 — the year after Dehghan began his studies at UCF. That’s when it became clear that AI could work at scale with enough data and compute resources.
Dehghan says that during his years at UCF, the research he did, experiences he had and advances his lab made set him up for success. Along the way, he was named Doctoral Student of the Year and received the Outstanding Dissertation Award. He has gone on to become a pioneer in the field of AI and an industry leader today.
In addition to technical skills, he credits UCF with teaching him the soft skills to navigate his career.
“The lab was highly collaborative, and we worked on large projects that required teamwork, communication and leadership. And we had invaluable opportunities to present at conferences and build our professional network,” Dehghan says. “We were held to a high standard — and that shaped me as a researcher, professional and leader.”
Pioneering New Tech at Apple
Today Dehghan heads the Multimodal Intelligence group at Apple. They focus on building AI technologies for new hardware that help devices better see, understand and make sense of the world.
When he initially joined Apple, he created the company’s always-on, real-time tracking engine based on neural networks for iPhone cameras that came out in 2018. He describes it as a full-circle moment that connected his early research during his internship in Portugal and his doctoral work at UCF to creating Apple’s first large-scale production object tracking system.
Since then, he has worked on building perception systems across iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro that help these devices sense, interpret and understand their environment. More recently, he worked on Apple Intelligence and building agentic systems across products, such as visual intelligence and Siri. Agentic systems are those that plan, reason and execute tasks autonomously, adapting their behavior as they go.
“I’m incredibly passionate about turning research into real-world technology and pushing the boundaries of what intelligent systems can do — and there are so many possibilities ahead of us in the world of AI,” Dehghan says.
“I’m so proud to see how the computer vision program that I was part of has evolved into the UCF Institute of Artificial Intelligence,” he says. “UCF is well positioned to shape the future of AI research and education, and it is doing exactly that!”
His path from UCF labs to shaping global AI technologies underscores the transformative power of supporting UCF’s people, programs and innovation.
Go for Launch
Dehghan shared his journey as a featured speaker at UCF’s February Go For Launch campaign liftoff, inspiring the UCF community with a firsthand look at how far a Knight education can lead.
Stories like his demonstrate why Go For Launch is so important: Investments in UCF fuel breakthroughs, support students and alumni, and create the kind of world-changing impact Dehghan now delivers at Apple.
