Virginia Tech to exhibit at the AI Expo for National Competitiveness

Virginia Tech will exhibit at the first AI Expo for National Competitiveness at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on May 7-8.

Chaired by former chief executive officer of Google Eric Schmidt, the expo serves as a forum for industry, government, and academic research entities to exhibit some of the latest technological breakthroughs in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), biotech, energy, networks, computing, microelectronics, manufacturing, and augmented reality. Leaders will discuss these advancements and their implications for U.S. and allied competitiveness.

Hosting alongside the second Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security, the event is free and open to the public but registration is recommended. For detailed information about the event, visit the expo’s online agenda.

Laura Freeman, deputy director of Virginia Tech’s National Security Institute, will be the featured speaker at the expo’s Talent Marketplace on the first day. She will share how the institute is preparing the present and future U.S. workforce for the integration of AI systems across all sectors of the economy and society. Freeman also will discuss experimental methods for conducting research that bring together cyber-physical systems, data science, AI, and machine learning to address critical challenges in national security.

On the second day of the expo on center stage, Eric Paterson, executive director of the National Security Institute, will participate in the panel discussion “Crafting Virginia’s Innovation District at the Intersection of Defense and Technology" with panelists Young Bang, principal deputy to the assistant secretary of the U.S. Army; Kapil Bakshi, distinguished solutions engineer at Cisco; and Evan Regan Levine, chief strategic officer with JBGS.

Additionally, Virginia Tech organizations that lead innovative research technologies in AI will demonstrate their expertise on the following topics at the university’s booth No. 506 on May 8:

Virginia Tech National Security Institute

Generative AI, such as large language models, provides an opportunity to both expedite and reimagine digital transformation. At the Virginia Tech National Security Institute, the current application domain is aerospace and defense, but the capability is domain agnostic. Institute researchers use these models to interpret human-made drawings and extract key content using the Internet of Things in smart city technology. In the researchers’ demonstration, the institute envisions Virginia Tech transitioning to a smart campus, where researchers add or subtract smart elements and prompt the models to adjust data-centric models as appropriate.

Center for Power Electronics Systems

Power electronics packaging plays a vital role in the efficiency, power density, reliability, and performance of data centers, electric vehicles, and renewable energy systems. In this demonstration, Virginia Tech researchers will showcase advanced packaging for power semiconductor chips.  

Multifunctional Integrated Circuits and Systems Center

Technological advances are moving society closer to a fully connected world. Connected services will require precise wireless circuits and systems powerful enough to support 6G technology. AI-enabled millimeter wave circuit design is revolutionizing the semiconductor research landscape and driving significant advancements in U.S. chip design and fabrication.

Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology

Virginia Tech research teams will demo the NAVIGAID mobile app, which aims to provide improved AI-based descriptions, navigation, and alerts to individuals with vision impairment. The team will share insights about the potential of inclusive technologies and accessible space-making.

Wireless@Virginia Tech

The demonstration will include AI/neural-network-based multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) receive processing, a distributed MIMO prototype, and a deep learning-based open radio access network slicing xApp, otherwise known as a software tool used by a radio access network intelligent controller to manage network functions in near-real time.

Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics

AI safety in the era of prevalent general-purpose AI, such as ChatGPT, presents a challenging task. Unlike domain-specific AI, general-purpose AI possesses broader capabilities and can engage with the unpredictable dynamics of various environments. Sanhani Center researchers’ work addresses diverse risk topics through red teaming, evaluating different communication patterns, and analyzing different use cases of large language models to thoroughly understand the risks associated with AI technological advancements.

The field of math-natural language processing has witnessed significant growth in recent years, motivated by the desire to expand large language models performance to the learning of non-linguistic notions. The researchers take a closer look into the phenomena of catastrophic forgetting as it pertains to large language models and subsequently offer a novel framework for non-linguistic skill injection for these models based on information-theoretic interventions and skill-specific losses that enable the learning of strict arithmetic reasoning.

Virginia Tech’s presence at the expo is supported by the Office of Strategic Research Alliances and LINK, the Center for Advancing Partnerships, who will have staff on hand at the booth.