Research demos display wide range of innovation at Alexandria campus

On Tuesday, local and national media members got a sneak peek at some of the groundbreaking work and dynamic educational spaces inside Virginia Tech’s new academic building in Alexandria before the grand opening ribbon-cutting ceremony and open house on Friday.  

“The opening of our new location here in Alexandria adds to Virginia Tech’s growing network of innovation in the greater D.C. area,” said Lance Collins, vice president and executive director of the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus. “Faculty and programs will support new outreach and partnerships that advance research and learning opportunities, enabling graduate students to address global-scale problems.”

Media members were joined by members of the university’s architecture and facilities teams, as well as partners from SmithGroup, which designed the building.

“It’s thrilling for someone in my position to see a project like this come up out of the ground,” said Liza Morris, assistant vice president for planning and university architect. “A project like this is a combination of a tremendous amount of luck, talent, and skill from massive teams to support this effort.”

Starting on the ground floor, the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology’s Immersive Visualization Lab offers not just a multisensory immersion experience, but a physical gateway that connects the new building to the rest of the commonwealth. Through partnering with Carving Out Creativity exhibits in Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory, Roanoke’s Taubman Museum, and Virginia Tech’s flagship campus in Blacksburg, the centerpiece invites viewers to touch carved sculptures and interact across distance, with digital versions of sculptures at the other sites.  

The second floor is home to dedicated space for Virginia Tech’s K-12 programming in the greater Washington, D.C., area. There, amid a recreation of the Martian surface, participants can program and build a small rover to drive it through obstacle courses and attempt to acquire samples from the environment. Programs like these provide an early introduction to computer science and STEM, while building new pathways for students to realize and pursue postsecondary goals.

The third floor is home to Virginia Tech’s wireless research. One group of students used the two-story drone cage to showcase how wireless technologies work in conjunction with AI and quantum technology to allow autonomous vehicles to navigate complex environments, which can be key in disaster relief efforts.

The other group showed ways of enhancing the quality of a high-data message by using multiple wireless transmitters to send the same message to a receiver. This usage of open radio access networks shows the potential for developing wireless technologies that transmit with much more clarity and less noise.

On the fourth floor, the Pamplin School of Business showcased a collaborative, cross-departmental effort to empower visually impaired users with greater independence by offering real-time guidance and information about their immediate surroundings. Created through a project from the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design and the Department of Computer Science, AI Accessibility is a mobile application that uses AI to provide audio-based navigation assistance, object detection, and environmental descriptions to users wearing Meta glasses.

Last but not least, the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, on the fifth floor, examined the flaws in the safeguards built into large language models like ChatGPT. Using Jailbreaking techniques, a team showed how to bypass or override the built-in safety, ethical, and operational constraints of these AI systems. By ethically hacking the systems, the team can exploit vulnerabilities in the model's architecture, prompt engineering, or other mechanisms to generate responses that are typically restricted or controlled. Identifying these hazards helps software engineers iterate more resilient future models.

The full range of demos will be on display to the general public at the open house, from 11:45 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Friday, following the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the grand opening of Innovation Campus Academic Building One. You can watch a livestream of the grand opening here.