Virginia Tech research partnership with Amazon Web Services highlighted at artificial intelligence conference
Co-principal investigator Maymoonah Toubeh presenting at the Amazon Web Services 2024 AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) Conference. Photo courtesy of William (Chris) Headley.
Virginia Tech faculty and student expertise was recently on display for government and industry leaders brought together by Amazon.
“It’s always good for us to be able to get the word out about the research we’re doing,” said Alyse Jones, research associate in the Virginia Tech National Security Institute. “Especially when we’re being highlighted by Amazon as an example of a great partner to work with.”
Jones was among the Hokies who presented their research related to the use of machine learning in the cloud to enhance wireless communication applications at Amazon Web Services 2024 AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) Conference in September. The university was one of just a few select academic institutes at the invitation-only event that consisted primarily of government and industry partners with a focus on accelerating generative artificial intelligence and machine learning for national security and defense.
Along with the research, the event highlighted the partnership between the Virginia Tech National Security Institute and Amazon. The students and faculty who presented are a part of the Emerging Technology Research Fellowship, which is a joint effort between Amazon Web Services and institute’s Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology to get students experience deploying state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms in the cloud for distributed radio frequency spectrum sensing.
Co-principal investigator Alyse Jones presenting at the Amazon Web Services 2024 AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) Conference. Photo courtesy of William (Chris) Headley.
“We are one of the first universities to be involved in Amazon Web Service’s initiative to show academic researchers how their tools, especially those used for machine learning, can be useful for the work we do,” said Jones, co-principal investigator of the fellowship.
David Appel, vice president of federal at Amazon Web Services, said the company aimed to take every opportunity to connect the project team with our customers to solicit their feedback and better support their critical missions.
“We are very proud of the work the AWS [Amazon Web Services]-Virginia Tech Emerging Technology Fellows are doing to prove out cloud-based radio frequency machine learning on AWS,” Appel said. “Together with VTNSI [Virginia Tech National Security Institute], AWS designed the project to address the challenges of signals intelligence customers, so we were thrilled to have the students and faculty share their work with AWS government customers and partners at the AWS AI/ML Conference in September.”
For Virginia Tech students in the fellowship, attending the conference provided them new experiences and new confidence in their work.
“This was my first time presenting at a conference and especially to a crowd that big,” said Dylan Green, a first year graduate student in computer engineering and a graduate research assistant at the Virginia Tech National Security Institute. “I got great feedback after, and not just from the Virginia Tech team, but also from people who were there from other companies. It was inspiring to see how many people were interested in the research I’m doing.”
Student researcher Dylan Green presenting at the Amazon Web Services 2024 AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) Conference. Photo courtesy of William (Chris) Headley.
For additional details, please reach out to technical principle investigator William "Chris" Headley at cheadley@vt.edu, or co-principle investigators Alyse Jones at alysemjones@vt.edu or Maymoonah Toubeh at may93@vt.edu.
