Amazon.com Inc. is committing $3 million over the next five years to Virginia Tech for machine learning and artificial intelligence research and fellowships at both the Blacksburg and Alexandria campuses, deepening the company's relationship with the university.
Virginia Tech will use Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) funding — $600,000 dispersed annually — to cover doctoral student fellowships, research projects and community outreach, said Julie Ross, the university’s dean of engineering, who’s based at the Blacksburg campus.
“This really is a multifaceted partnership that will allow our students and faculty to work closely with Amazon to learn about the state of their problems that they have in their industry that they’re interested in solving, and it brings real-world applications to the classrooms,” Ross said in an interview.
The program, called the Amazon-Virginia Tech Initiative for Efficient and Robust Machine Learning, will be housed in the university’s college of engineering and led by researchers at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, which collaborates with dozens of companies and federal agencies on machine-learning projects in Blacksburg and at the school's new Potomac Yard campus.
“The proximity of this initiative to Amazon’s HQ2 will catalyze research efforts that leverage the depth of talent in the Northern Virginia area to address some of the most pressing challenges in AI,” said Prem Natarajan, vice president of Alexa AI – Natural Understanding at Amazon, in a statement.
An Amazon spokesperson declined to provide additional comment.
The Amazon-Virginia Tech relationship has deepened in recent years with the arrival of the Potomac Yard graduate campus, a phased $1 billion project that contributed to Amazon choosing neighboring Crystal City for its second headquarters. Virginia Tech says those ties "will only enhance our academic offerings" by offering students "opportunities to study today’s pressing technological needs and issues and engage with leaders in the field," Michael Stowe, a university spokesman, said in an email.
Stowe said it is the university, not Amazon, that determines what will be taught in Virginia Tech classrooms.
“As with every academic program, it is our faculty who guide and manage the learning and engagement process and determine the curricula of the course, ensuring the quality of the academic program meets our very high standards," he said.
The commonwealth hopes to enroll 750 master’s and doctoral students in computer science and computer engineering in Potomac Yard by 2028 — the campus is open now, operating out of temporary space. Virginia Tech broke ground at 3575 Potomac Ave. in September and expects to deliver its first academic building in spring 2024.
This latest partnership with Amazon won’t impact Virginia Tech’s future relationships and opportunities with other industry leaders, Stowe emphasized.
“Virginia Tech has a strong history of studying practical problems in collaboration with industry," he said. "And, machine learning is one of the most collaborative disciplines with significant cross-pollination between academia and industry."
The initiative will open to Virginia Tech’s graduate and doctoral students interested in AI-focused fields, as well as faculty members, Virginia Tech announced Thursday. The selection process will launch in the spring, and the first cohort of Amazon fellows will start in the program in the fall, Stowe said. Doctoral students who are currently enrolled in their second, third, or fourth year at Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering will be eligible to apply for the fellowship, which includes a paid Amazon internship the following summer.
This partnership also establishes an advisory board with representatives from Amazon and Virginia Tech to direct the initiative, research project proposals, award fellowships and engage in community outreach, the university said.
