Putting transparent, explainable AI in the hands of every student in Virginia — from high school to PhD — on hardware that costs less than a textbook.
Community colleges serve the Commonwealth's largest student population, yet they lack GPU clusters, cloud subscriptions, and specialized faculty. Meanwhile, employers in Virginia's defense corridor and data center industry increasingly demand workers who understand not just how to use AI — but how to explain it.
The platform is a four-stage pipeline written in standard C with zero external dependencies. The total binary footprint is under 200KB. A student with basic programming knowledge can understand the entire system.
Reads real CSV data, extracts frequency distributions and cross-field correlations
Generates a human-readable specification file — every field's type and range visible on one page
Produces synthetic records at 68,000+ rows per second — deterministic, reproducible, every time
Restores realistic joint distributions by sampling from original conditional distributions
| Metric | Cloud AI Platform | Virginia AI Corps |
|---|---|---|
| Annual cost per institution | $25,000 – $100,000 | $0 (VIPC-sponsored) |
| Hardware required | Cloud GPU instances | Existing computers or $15 Pi |
| Network dependency | Continuous internet required | Fully offline |
| Faculty expertise needed | ML / Data Science PhD | Basic programming |
| Data generation speed | Hours (model training) | 30 seconds |
| Explainability | None (black box) | Complete — every value auditable |
| Student accessibility | Resource-gated | Universal |
The AI Corps extends across Virginia's entire educational pipeline. A student at Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap gets the same AI toolkit as a PhD candidate at Mason's Fairfax campus. The curriculum is developed centrally at George Mason and distributed statewide through VCCS.
Graduates enter the workforce understanding AI transparency at a moment when H.R. 6881, the AI Foundation Model Transparency Act, is poised to make explainability a federal procurement requirement. Virginia's students will be trained for this reality before it arrives.
The partners: VIPC provides funding and statewide coordination. George Mason's Department of Computational & Data Sciences develops curriculum, trains faculty, and ensures quality. SDGAI provides the technology platform with no per-seat licensing.
The technology exists. The partnership is in place. We invite Virginia's legislators to learn more about bringing the AI Corps to every corner of the Commonwealth.