A Vertically Integrated Projects Model for Multi-Institution and Multi-Discipline Undergraduate Research in Radio Frequency AI/ML

With the ever-increasing proliferation of AI/ML-enabled commercial devices and online tools, undergraduate students are increasingly entering college wanting to learn the necessary skills to pursue a career in AI/ML research and development. For these very same reasons, there is an increasing need of these same skills within career paths within the U.S. Government. Given these facts, the Virginia Tech National Security Institute, in partnership with Morehouse College, set out to create a unique multi-college and multi-disciplinary Vertically Integrated Projects undergraduate research model, now in its fourth year of practice. In this paper, we will overview this model and showcase how it uniquely fuses student career interests, cutting-edge faculty research interests, and U.S. Government workforce development opportunities, with a particular focus on AI/ML. After this introduction, we then provide a brief technical overview of an exemplar on-going undergraduate research project related to the application of reinforcement learning to wireless radio frequency communications. In particular, we present our technical and managerial approach to running the project, the technical research outcomes of the project, and the student outcomes derived from this project through post-semester student surveys. Additionally, we provide key lessons learned and areas in which the VIP model has evolved over the course of the first four years that have helped to both increase student engagement in the technical research itself, but also overall student workforce development outcomes.