By Nate Doughty – Staff Reporter, Washington Business Journal - Virginia Tech this week unveiled the Institute for Advanced Computing at its Potomac Yard campus to offer academic and research opportunities in AI and quantum computing — and it's looking for more companies to work with.
At buildout, the institute will employ 50 full-time faculty members and occupy about a third of Virginia Tech's Academic Building One, a $302 million, 300,000-square-foot facility in Alexandria that opened in January. That's all somewhat subject to grant funding, enrollment and the total number of partnerships, according to Kirk Cameron, professor of computer science at Virginia Tech and interim director of the institute.
Northrop Grumman Corp., Bloomberg Industry Group and The Boeing Co., the latter of which made a $50 million donation to Virginia Tech's Potomac Yard outpost, as well as regional government and nonprofits like the United States Marine Corps Community Services, are already signed up to work with the institute on business cases for advanced technologies.
The partners will have access to maker spaces, high-tech equipment used to build advanced computing systems, lab space for drone experimentation, emerging wireless technologies and immersive augmented and virtual reality testing environments.
"We're taking the point of view of creating this unit that allows us to ease collaborations, both within and across the institution and beyond, to these partners that we're working closely with — these nonprofits, these industry partners and government agencies," Cameron said.
Over time, he expects the institute will prove of interest to the health care and banking sectors, industries he said "have been majorly disrupted by technology" from data, security and consumer experience perspectives, highlighting challenges he hopes the institute will be able to help address.
"The theme is computing, and we hadn't really figured out a way to, prior to the creation or the idea behind creating an institute, we hadn't really figured out a great way to formulate that activity into a cohesive academic unit," he said. "The Institute for Advanced Computing was designed to capture that in essence."
Click here to continue reading (subscription required).