Partnering on projects

Faced with the choice of pursuing their own capstone project or teaming with a private corporation on a specific venture, Alyssa Lowe and her group of six master’s degree-seeking classmates went with something quite captivating: developing rain detection software for Torc Robotics to use in its autonomous trucks.

“It just seemed really interesting to us,” Lowe said. “It was also nice that we could learn about the project and see an end goal. You don't want to go into your capstone not knowing what your solution will look like at all, but we could look at this project and say, ‘I can see where we can take this, and this fits in all of our group’s interests.’ That's why Torc stuck out to us.”

Lowe ’22 and her team got the opportunity because of unique partnerships between the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus and several public and private industry partners. Specifically created for students seeking master’s degrees in computer science and computer engineering, these partnerships provided the opportunity for students to fulfill the condition of completing a capstone project as part of their degree requirements.

In addition to Torc Robotics, other companies and organizations that have participated over the past spring and fall semesters include The Boeing Company, which is a foundational partner of the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus and has committed $50 million toward computer science and computer engineering programming, the MITRE Corporation, INTEGRITYOne Partners, and the U.S. Marine Corps.

In the simplest of terms, the partnerships call for these companies to provide projects that require the software expertise of Virginia Tech students, with the companies also providing background support from their engineers. In return, the students receive practical experience.

This model of learning is called project-based learning and has been a part of the Innovation Campus since its inception. Now, campus officials want to make it a more extensive, organized part of the curriculum by securing additional partnerships with outside firms.

In fact, campus officials want to make project-based learning between a third and up to a half of the curriculum, according to Kirk Cameron, associate vice president of academic affairs at the Innovation Campus and a professor of computer science.

“It allows us to find what I would call real-world problems, things that companies are struggling with,” Cameron said. “We work with all sorts of companies. Some are startups, and they don't have the resources to explore many different aspects of the kinds of products that they develop to see if there's a capability that can be created that didn't exist before. Sometimes for larger companies, they struggle with challenges like communications where software or hardware might be able to play role.

“Our Master of Engineering students get the benefit of working on these contemporary real-world challenges. They work in teams, so they develop all the soft skills necessary to manage and work closely with people. It puts them in a spot to gain an advantage when they graduate because they have already worked in teams extensively on hard-to-solve projects where there may or may not be a workable solution.”

Real-world applications

At the Innovation Campus, Erika Olimpiew first told the 27 students in her course to form into groups of five or six. She then gave each group the choice of either working on its own capstone project or working on one provided by companies. Two groups in her course chose to do separate projects.

For the students who wanted to work with companies, Olimpiew, collegiate associate professor of computer science, met with most companies beforehand to make sure the projects fit within capstone guidelines and the curriculum of her course.

“Working with a company is very different than working on your own project,” Olimpiew said. “Teachers are not the same as stakeholders or companies. They have different expectations. The company, they're not really evaluating the students, but they're sort of hoping to work with them in a way that would benefit both.

“The students got to interact with somebody who really cares about the product that they're building in the sense that it's going to be useful for the company's bottom line or future products. It’s not just going to be something that somebody's going to grade and evaluate.”

The Torc Robotics project involved the group of students collecting camera data and lidar (light detection and ranging) sensor data from Torc and making a machine-learning model that detects rain in images. The group also created an algorithm that detects rain in lidar scans.

Lowe, who is from Yorktown, Virginia, said the group achieved an 85 percent accuracy in the machine-learning model for the images and an estimated 75 percent accuracy in the lidar scan algorithm. Together, the group got between 90 to 92 percent accuracy.

Lowe said Torc Robotics planned to test the group’s software directly first and then possibly implement it within the company’s autonomous vehicles.

“It's awesome for us,” Lowe said of the project. “I think when you're going through these projects, a lot of people can kind of lose scope and say, ‘Oh, they're probably not even going to really use this.’ Having that reinforcement from the company of them saying, ‘Hey, could you put it in this format so we can go ahead and throw it into our pipeline?’ — it's really reassuring as a student to know that they think the work we're doing is valuable to them.”

Luis Pol ’22, a Boeing Scholar from Alexandria expressed similar sentiments about his experience.  He and a group of classmates worked on a project for the MITRE Corporation, a nonprofit operator of Federal Research and Development Centers headquartered in McLean that works with government agencies to solve challenging technical problems. The project involved finding the location of a “burner” phone transmission within a minute of a call being made.

Pol, who graduated from Virginia Tech with degrees in computer science and Spanish and minors in cybersecurity and mathematics, said he had a “fun semester.”

“I like that way of learning,” Pol said. “I like more open-ended problems. It's fun that way, because you don’t know what the end results are going to look like, and you can go 10 different ways. When it comes to software engineering projects [in the classroom], they have grading scripts, everything's been already preset, and oftentimes you get skeleton code, so some of the design parameters are already hard coded onto your project. There's not a lot of leeway that you can take.

“The fun part with [working with a company] is that they’re not telling you how to do it. Your group is coming up with the criteria and design for the project.”

The groups’ work, though, didn’t end with the solutions. Olimpiew assigned each group to give an in-person presentation about its project.

“I wanted everybody to see everybody else’s presentation,” she said. “And I want them to have practice standing in front of groups of people and speaking.”

Companies getting a boost

Tony Petruccelli, a partner at INTEGRITYOne Partners located in Fairfax, and his team had been working on a specific artificial intelligence project off and on internally for a while. One of his employees was in Virginia Tech’s graduate program and informed the managing group about Virginia Tech’s interest in outside capstone projects for students.

“It had been a goal of ours to make connections into some of the respected universities in the area for a couple of reasons,” Petruccelli said. “No. 1 is to get some injection of new technology and innovation, and the other is it’s a way for us to broaden our recruiting base as well.”

The small business ended up partnering with the Innovation Campus, and a group of students worked on the internal project. The group took what INTEGRITYOne Partners had started, expanded it, and then added some twists to it.

INTEGRITYOne Partners put what the students produced into pilot testing and continues to try to optimize it. In Petruccelli’s words, the students “gave us a big boost.”

“Having never done it before, I'm not sure we knew what to expect other than we knew we were going to establish a connection with Virginia Tech,” Petruccelli said. “We figured, ‘Well, it's a top graduate program. We're probably going to get some good stuff out of it.’ We just didn't know what. I have to say the students were good. They were very dedicated.”

In contrast, MITRE Corporation has been working with college students for years. Last spring, management took a unique approach, creating a hypothetical project for a group of Virginia Tech graduate students that involved building an application to identify “burner” phones within an accuracy of 100 meters and within a minute of transmission. In this scenario, a company offers this service to allow customers to determine whether nearby burner phones represent a security or safety risk.

This scenario included some issues that MITRE was facing on some of its other projects, according to Ken Kaiser, senior principal engineer at MITRE.

“We had been discussing the problems that we were having, and it dealt with moving objects and dealt with points on a map,” Kaiser said. “We wanted to know about more of those aspects. We've been working on this for some time, and we wanted to reach out to academia, but not with our biases – biases being our knowledge about the topic area and in the domain. That’s why we wrote up a fictitious scenario.”

The group of graduate students gave a presentation to classmates in early May and then another presentation to MITRE representatives. MITRE’s engineers are using aspects of what the Virginia Tech group produced.

MITRE’s management, which included Kaiser, Chief Engineer Chris Magrin, and Principal Systems Engineer Derek Prosperie, liked the ideas that it received from the Virginia Tech team and from other student groups on previous projects. They plan to continue those relationships not just to get ideas, but also to do its part to increase the talent pipeline in a growing industry.

“For them to have the experience, to have done something real with machine learning and algorithms is a distinguishing factor when I would look at a resume for potential candidates to hire,” Prosperie said.

Tessema Mengistu, collegiate assistant professor of computer science, taught the spring capstone course in which students worked closely with INTEGRITYOne Partners and MITRE.

Future of project-based learning

Innovation Campus officials plan to scale up the project-based portion of their curriculum, starting this fall. The details are to be fleshed out, but they want students to go deeper in these projects, combining the technical experience that they receive in coursework and applying that to the projects in which they participate.

According to Cameron, industry leaders in the greater Washington, D.C., metro area, including those serving on the Innovation Campus’ Advisory Board, are extremely excited about the possibilities.

“Pretty much universally all of them are enthusiastic about the idea of the students gaining the kinds of skills that would put them in the position not only to work well in teams when they start, ready to work on challenging projects, but also with the ability for upward mobility into management,” Cameron said. “Our goal is to graduate master’s students who are experienced from day one on working in, and helping manage, productive teams.”

Lowe and Pol, the two graduate students, and many others provide firsthand evidence of the partnerships’ benefits. Both have jobs lined up – Lowe with a government contractor in Washington, D.C., and Pol as an analyst with Boeing.

Already attractive candidates before landing employment, they made themselves more so with their work on their capstone projects.

“It will be worth your time,” Pol said when asked what advice he’d tell incoming graduate students. “It’s not going to be all fun days, but you are going to learn how to address issues and start thinking and asking the right questions. You're going to get experience working with real problems, and you’re going to get exposure to networking – and all that’s magical.”