Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus launches in Alexandria

Virginia Tech’s Walid Saad was used to traveling between the university’s locations in Arlington and Fairfax counties to meet students and teach classes.

Saad, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, works at the intersection of wireless networking and artificial intelligence, including using quantum technology to bridge communication gaps between drones navigating complex environments, like disaster zones.

In January, Saad and his graduate students moved to a new home: Virginia Tech’s 300,000-square-foot Innovation Campus Academic Building One, in Alexandria’s Potomac Yard neighborhood. It’s the first part of Tech’s $1.1 billion Alexandria campus focused on producing more computer science and computer engineering graduates, a statewide goal known as Virginia’s Tech Talent Investment Program. State and private partners are investing more than $2 billion to expand Virginia’s tech workforce pipeline, with a goal of producing 32,000 more computer science and engineering graduates in the next 20 years.

Open since late January, Tech’s 11-story Innovation Campus Academic Building One is home to the university’s graduate programs in computer science, computer engineering and business, which have about 500 students. Two additional buildings, each about 150,000 square feet are slated for the future, though they have yet to be planned, says Lance Collins, vice president and executive director of the Innovation Campus. The university plans to grow into its first building during the next five years, with about 750 master’s and 200 doctoral students planned overall.

The Innovation Campus became a significant selling point in drawing Amazon.com to Northern Virginia for its East Coast headquarters, HQ2, just a Metro stop away in Arlington County. That initiative also included funding for George Mason University’s new $254 million Fuse at Mason Square, a tech hub based in Arlington’s Ballston-Rosslyn sections. Both buildings come as Northern Virginia looks to become a tech hub, taking advantage of its proximity to the federal government, as well several intelligence, defense and aerospace contractors headquartered in the region.

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In Virginia Tech’s new academic building, Saad and his graduate students have access to a two-floor drone cage, as well as other graduate students working across emerging technologies to collaborate on projects, including those who might be able to quickly build an AI software tool.

“I don’t typically really need a lot of hardware space, because we do a lot of math and we prove things and do simulations, but being able to have people who have complementary skills that … can build an AI tool in two hours that we need maybe two days to do, these type of collaborations are kind of unique to the Innovation Campus,” Saad says.

Arlington County-based Boeing committed $50 million to the new Innovation Campus, and Falls Church-based Northrop Grumman committed $12.5 million in recent years. Money from the Fortune 500 contractors is being used to fund academic programming and faculty, and a 200-seat classroom that can be converted to an event space to accommodate 300 people is named for Boeing.

“What’s important is, this district is positioned to really keep us, the U.S., at the forefront of technology,” Collins says. “It’s an international competition, and other countries are trying to knock us off.”

The new building, which cost about $302 million, includes 14 classrooms that range from 25 to 90 seats, 32 “huddle rooms” to boost student and faculty collaboration, a cyber lab, space for K-12 education, and a suite to house the Northern Virginia home of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, named for Octo CEO Mehul Sanghani and his wife, Hema, both Tech alumni who donated $10 million for the center.

Tech’s Pamplin College of Business will also take up space on the fourth floor, and two floors of the building are left as shell space to accommodate future programming needs, says Sven Shockey, design director for SmithGroup, which led the project’s contemporary design.

True to its name, the first building in the Innovation Campus incorporates technologies to take advantage of its physical location as well as enhance its sustainability. That includes a “heliomorphic” design influenced by the sun’s orientation and movement to improve lighting and energy as well as embedded photovoltaic systems integrated into glass and as shading fins to generate electricity for the building. The all-electric building uses 25% less power than typical buildings, Shockey says, and, through the use of its photovoltaic systems, could power about 40 homes annually.

“This will be one of the first buildings in the United States to use that that technology,” says Shockey, who received his master’s in architecture from Virginia Tech. “Curiosity is one of the important drivers for innovation in general. So, I think we wanted a building to evoke curiosity and to be able to express some things that buildings perhaps normally don’t.”