CLUSTER, CI and HCOMP 2026 in Alexandria: Travel Guide

Three conferences run in the same building outside Washington DC across nine days this September. CLUSTER 2026 is there from 22 to 25 September. CI 2026 and HCOMP 2026 follow from 27 to 30 September, co-located and, in the organisers’ words, tightly integrated.

All three are at Virginia Tech Academic Building One, 3625 Potomac Avenue, on the university’s new Innovation Campus in Alexandria. The building opened in 2025: eleven storeys, 300,000 square feet, and less than a block from its own Metro station.

Two things will cost you money or time if you get them wrong, and neither is obvious.

HCOMP is not called HCOMP any more

If you are searching for the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, you will not find the 2026 edition. It has moved to ACM and been renamed The 2026 ACM Conference on Human-AI Complementarity and Alignment. The community and the HCOMP acronym carry over, and the scope is deliberately wider than crowdsourcing now.

Practically, that means the conference lives at hcomp.acm.org rather than under the AAAI umbrella, and that older bookmarks, mailing list archives and calendar entries will point you at the wrong place.

The venue is in Alexandria. The hotels are in Arlington.

This is the part worth reading twice.

Potomac Yard, where the campus sits, is a new district built out of a former rail yard. It is mostly apartments and retail, and it has no hotels of its own. Not a thin selection: effectively none. So although the conference address says Alexandria, the nearest beds are north, across the line in Arlington, in the National Landing and Crystal City area.

The distances, measured from the venue:

• Arlington / National Landing: 1.1 to 2.0 km. The three closest hotels are all on the conferences’ own recommended list.
• Old Town Alexandria: 3.5 to 4.1 km in the opposite direction, and where the rest of the recommended list sits.

Neither is walking-to-lunch close, so the decision is really about which side you want to be on in the evening. There is also a genuine name trap here: Virginia Tech has a second Northern Virginia facility on North Glebe Road in Arlington, several kilometres from this one. Book a hotel around that address and you will be nowhere near the conference.

Where to stay

Distances are from Academic Building One.

Closest, and all conference hotels. Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel (details) is the nearest at 1.1 km, roughly a 16 minute walk, with a free DCA shuttle. Hyatt Regency Crystal City at Reagan National Airport (details) is at 1.2 km and the larger full-service option, with an outdoor pool. Hilton Arlington National Landing (details) is at 1.6 km in the middle of the Amazon HQ2 district, which is where the restaurants are.

Cheaper, same side. Hampton Inn & Suites Arlington/Crystal City DCA (details) at 2.0 km includes hot breakfast and is the sensible student pick. Crystal City Marriott at Reagan National Airport (details) and DoubleTree by Hilton Washington DC - Crystal City (details) sit at 2.0 and 2.7 km. Residence Inn Arlington Pentagon City (details) at 2.9 km has kitchenettes, worth it if you are staying for both weeks.

Old Town Alexandria, the other direction. This is the nicer place to spend an evening and the longer commute. Hilton Alexandria Old Town (details) at 3.6 km is beside King Street Metro and the Amtrak station. Archer Hotel Old Town Alexandria (details) at 3.6 km has a spa and a Virginia Tech rate. Morrison House Old Town Alexandria (details) at 3.7 km is a 45 room boutique, the smallest thing on the list. The Alexandrian Old Town Alexandria (details) at 3.8 km sits on King Street with free bikes.

Embassy Suites by Hilton Alexandria Old Town (details) at 3.8 km is the designated CLUSTER 2026 hotel and is directly across from King Street Metro, which makes the commute simple even though the distance is not short. The Westin Alexandria Old Town (details) at 4.1 km is the quieter corporate option in Carlyle.

The full list is on the Alexandria and Arlington city pages, and the conference-rate question is covered here.

Getting there, which is the easy part

Reagan National (DCA) is one Metro stop from the venue. That is not an exaggeration: take the Yellow or Blue line one stop south to Potomac Yard-VT and walk about five minutes on a flat paved path. A rideshare is around $15 and takes a similar time. For a conference venue, this is close to the best airport access in the United States.

Dulles (IAD) is about an hour: Silver line, then change to the Yellow or Blue. BWI is usually the cheapest to fly into and the slowest to reach, via MARC train to Union Station and then Metro.

If you drive, the on-site garage is $4 per hour up to four hours or $20 flat for the day, through ParkMobile. Overnight parking is not allowed, so a hotel with its own parking matters if you have a car.

Between sessions

Old Town Alexandria is the obvious evening. King Street runs about a mile from the Metro down to the Potomac, lined with independent restaurants and bars, and it is one of the best preserved eighteenth century districts in the country. The Torpedo Factory Art Center, a former munitions plant on the waterfront now full of working studios, is free to walk through.

Washington itself is the other answer, and the reason this location is genuinely good. You are on the Yellow and Blue lines, so the Smithsonian museums, the National Mall and the monuments are twenty to thirty minutes away and the museums are free. If you have an evening spare, the Mall after dark is quieter and better than the daytime version.

Closer to the venue, National Landing is the Amazon HQ2 district and has filled with restaurants over the last few years, which is the practical argument for staying on the Arlington side.

One planning note for the second week

CI and HCOMP are co-located and integrated rather than merely adjacent, so a single registration decision covers a lot of the programme. If you are attending both, treat 27 to 30 September as one event. If you are coming for CLUSTER as well, note the gap between 25 and 27 September: you either book straight through and lose two days, or fly home and back. For most people arriving from outside North America, booking through will be cheaper than a second transatlantic pair of flights.