RICHMOND, Va. — Another food and beverage venue fashioned from shipping containers is taking shape in Richmond, this time near the Sauer Center courtesy of a D.C. restaurant group.

The Virginia Transit Co., or Vitco as its founders John Groth, Arturo Zaloga and Matt Weaver refer to it, will be a bar, restaurant and event space constructed mostly out of dozen shipping containers on a vacant parcel at 1010 N. Meadow St.

Vitco is the second concept for Groth, Zaloga and Weaver, who in 2021 opened Metrobar, a similar concept in D.C. that’s anchored by a 75-foot-long former Washington Metro car that they repurposed into a restaurant and bar. For their Richmond venture, they’re incorporating a decommissioned streetcar. Click here to continue reading on Richmond BizSense.

Virginia recently expanded its express lane network, with new lanes opening in the Tyson and McLean areas. So what happens when those lanes end right around the American Legion Bridge?

Maryland leaders are now being questioned about the possibility of express lanes reaching their side of the Potomac.

Virginia has basically gone as far as it can with express lanes on this section of the Beltway. The American Legion Bridge belongs to Maryland, and anything that’s going to happen across this bridge or into the Maryland Beltway, that is solely on the state of Maryland.

Should even more express toll lanes now head across the legion bridge and continue into Maryland? News4 asked some Maryland drivers and support for a new, quicker travel option across the Potomac.

“It would be nice to go to Tysons again,” said Matt, a Maryland driver. “It’s kind of impossible to get there with the traffic.”

“Because it’s time-saving and there’s so much traffic on the Beltway coming to and from, I think it would be a nice addition,” said Stephanie, another Maryland driver. “I don’t want to go through the hassle of making it, so, but other than that would be in favor.”

Any new improvement will take construction — and a lot of it.

Chris Conklin with Montgomery County’s Department of Transportation told News4 much of their focus, along with the state right now, is on building a new American Legion Bridge or making serious upgrades to the existing structure.

“From what we understand, the state is working hard to come up with a viable financial plan to enhance, repair and replace the American legion bridge,” he said.

That could mean federal funding or some sort of toll revenue plan for the bridge.

Experts News4 has talked to say the existing Legion Bridge in its current form will need serious upgrades or need to be replaced completely by the end of this decade — as in four years or so.

Maryland’s Department of Transportation sent News4 a statement about the Legion Bridge, saying, “Current activities funded in Maryland’s capital budget include completing field investigations necessary for final design and construction, acquiring permits and developing a life cycle study for the Legion Bridge to determine various options to maintain the existing bridge in a state of good repair.”

During a ribbon cutting for the new express lanes in Virginia, outgoing Gov. Glenn Youngkin talked about the need for Maryland leaders to begin improvements on their side of the beltway.

“We collectively urge Maryland to get on with it,” he said.

Sources also say the Moore administration in Maryland is looking forward to better agreement about how to reshape this part of the Beltway with incoming Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger.

Officials also told News4 money for a new Legion bridge could be tight, because Maryland has other bridge projects in the works, including replacing the collapsed Key Bridge in Baltimore and safety improvements to the Bay Bridge.

Faculty awards

Additionally, four faculty members received funding through the initiative for their projects. 

Muhammad Ali Gulzar, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, received funding for “Foundations on the Code Comprehensibility of Large Language Models.” LLMs have demonstrated strong performance in code generation. With the rise of agentic LLMs, their use is rapidly expanding into post development tasks requiring a deeper semantic understanding of code that is not strictly rooted in lexical and syntactic code features. While popular LLM benchmarks measure the accuracy of LLMs’ code generation, the extent to which LLMs truly understand code remains largely unevaluated. This project seeks to design a scalable, quantitative, and automated method for assessing how well an LLM understands code and the impact of this understanding on post-development tasks. The goal is to encourage more mindful use in coding tasks and, in the long run, provide an actionable basis for prioritizing training data for LLM fine-tuning.

Ming Jin, assistant professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received funding for “Enhancing Foundation Model Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning with Novel Reward Design.” Current efforts to enhance foundation model reasoning face limitations like high compute costs; reward hacking and stability issues with learned reward models; difficulty balancing reasoning quality and efficiency; and challenges in multimodal contexts. Improving complex reasoning of foundation models reliably and efficiently is critical for Amazon’s AI ecosystem. Producing both critiques and actionable hints for a richer signal has shown promise for improving optimization efficiency and effectiveness in previous research. This proposal builds on this foundation by designing novel reward signals that guide a model’s reasoning process, transforming it into a more autonomous agent capable of tackling complex, multi-step problems. 

Chang-Tien Lu, professor in the Department of Computer Science and associate director of the Sanghani Center, received funding for “Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Reasoning in Multi-Agent Systems.” Multi-agent systems enhance performance by combining a weaker but locally accessible model with a more powerful yet proprietary black-box remote model. This combination exposes local data to a remote agent, raising concerns about information leakage, especially in sensitive domains like healthcare information, financial records, and e-commerce activities. For virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa and smart home systems, which frequently process sensitive user data, robust local data protection is also crucial for preserving user privacy and trust. The goal of this research is to design a collaborative reasoning mechanism without exposing sensitive local data to thoroughly protect it before the black-box model inference. 

Tu Vu, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, received funding for “Efficient Model Development through Fine-tuning Transfer.” Large Language Models are continually evolving, with newer versions released to improve pretraining quality, architecture, or alignment. Yet each new version of the base model typically demands repeated and computationally expensive alignment procedures. This inefficiency extends to domain- or language-specific models, where fine-tuning must be redone from scratch with every base model upgrade. Transferring fine-tuning updates (i.e., weight differences or “diff vectors”) across model versions offers a compelling alternative: enabling model updates without full retraining. This proposed approach promises to significantly reduce training costs while maintaining competitive performance, making it a viable strategy for sustainable LLM development.

About the workshop

The invitation-only AI workshop was held in Ocotber at Academic Building One in Alexandria and included remarks by Lance Collins, vice president of the greater Washington, D.C., area; Ramakrishnan; and Anand Rathi, center liaison and director, software development, artificial general intelligence, at Amazon. 

“We are pleased to welcome our Amazon collaborators to Virginia Tech’s new Academic Building One in Alexandria for our annual gathering,” Ramakrishnan said. “It is a great opportunity to connect Virginia Tech faculty in the space of AI with Amazon researchers and foster future collaborations.”  

“Our collaboration with Virginia Tech represents a strategic investment in developing the next generation of AI talent and innovation,” said Rathi. “The research emerging from this partnership continues to advance our understanding of responsible and efficient AI systems while preparing students for the complex challenges of tomorrow.”

Additionally, Chalapathi Choppa, senior manager, security engineer, Amazon, discussed Amazon Artificial General Intelligence and the importance of responsible AI, and two Virginia Tech faculty members who have sponsored research projects with Amazon gave lightning talks. They were: 

• Ruoxi Jia, assistant professor, Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, “A Compositional Framework for Proactive AI Safety”
• Hongliang Xin, assistant professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, “Next-Generation Catalysts for Fischer–Tropsch Synthesis”

Previous events related to the initiative have been held at the Virginia Tech Research Center — Arlington and on the university’s Blacksburg campus.