The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Sector and Technologies has picked five new investigation fellows for 2023-24. Now in its 3rd yr, the initiative underscores the approaches in which market and exploration can collaborate to spur technological innovation.
By way of its partnership with the School of Engineering, Accenture presents five yearly fellowships awarded to graduate college students with the purpose of making powerful new insights on the convergence of company and technology with the probable to remodel culture. The 2023-24 fellows will perform investigate in regions which includes synthetic intelligence, sustainability, and robotics.
The 2023-24 Accenture Fellows are:
Yiyue Luo
Yiyue Luo is a PhD prospect who is developing ground breaking integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, digital fabrication, and wise wearables. Her function takes benefit of modern innovations in digital production and AI, and the convergence in highly developed sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable electronic producing, and emerging computational approaches, with the goal of creating novel sensing and actuation units that revolutionize interactions between men and women and their environments. In earlier initiatives, Luo has formulated tactile sensing clothing including socks, gloves, and vests, as perfectly as a workflow for computationally developing and digitally fabricating tender textiles-based mostly pneumatic actuators. With the support of an Accenture Fellowship, she will progress her do the job of combining sensing and actuating equipment and discover the growth of haptic units that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her greatest intention is to create a scalable, textile-based mostly, closed-loop human-machine interface. Luo’s investigate retains enjoyable potential to progress floor-breaking apps for smart textiles, well being care, artificial and digital fact, human-device interactions, and robotics.
Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD candidate whose exploration explores foundation models, a course of models that varieties the basis of transformative general-objective systems (GPTs) this sort of as GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will help Munyikwa to perform exploration aimed at illuminating the existing and likely impression of foundation designs (including huge language types) on perform and responsibilities typical to “high-skilled” know-how staff in industries these types of as advertising, legal expert services, and medicine, in which foundation products are predicted to have considerable economic and social impacts. A key aim of her venture is to notice the impact of AI augmentation on tasks like copywriting and extensive-form crafting. A 2nd aim is to discover two main techniques that basis styles are driving the convergence of creative and technological industries, particularly: lessening the price tag of material technology and enabling the progress of instruments and platforms for schooling and schooling. Munyikwa’s work has important implications for the use of foundation designs in a lot of fields, from well being care and schooling to legal services, business enterprise, and technologies.
Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD candidate in social engineering systems whose research explores human-AI collaboration with the targets of building a deeper comprehension of AI-based mostly systems (which includes ChatGPT and DALL-E), assessing their performance and evolution, and steering their progress towards societally valuable purposes, like local climate improve mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will support Vaccaro’s existing operate towards two crucial aims: pinpointing synergies involving human beings and AI-based application to assistance style human-AI units that handle persistent difficulties superior than present strategies and investigating programs of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological modify, precisely for renewable energy systems. By integrating the traditionally unique domains of AI, devices engineering, and cognitive science with a vast vary of industries, complex fields, and social apps, Vaccaro’s get the job done has the likely to progress unique and collective efficiency and creative imagination in all these areas.
Chonghuan Wang is a PhD candidate in computational science and engineering whose research employs statistical studying, econometrics idea, and experimental style and design to generate productive, reliable, and sustainable industry experiments in many domains. In his recent do the job, Wang is implementing statistical learning methods this kind of as on the net understanding and bandit theory to examination the usefulness of new treatments, vaccinations, and health and fitness treatment interventions. With the assist of an Accenture Fellowship, he will style experiments with the distinct goal of comprehension the trade-off concerning the reduction of a patient’s welfare and the precision of estimating the treatment impact. The final results of this research could enable to preserve life and consist of illness outbreaks all through pandemics like Covid-19. The added benefits of improved experiment layout and the selection of significant-excellent details extend perfectly past health and fitness treatment for illustration, these applications could assist companies enhance person engagement, exam pricing impacts, and improve the utilization of platforms and products and services. Wang’s research retains exciting probable to harness statistical finding out, econometrics principle, and experimental design and style in assistance of strong enterprises and the larger social very good.
Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD applicant whose research seeks to increase our understanding of human motor handle and robotics. His do the job aims to progress rehabilitation systems and prosthetic devices, as properly as increase robotic dexterity. His earlier do the job has yielded important insights into the human ability to extract facts exclusively from visible displays. Specially, he shown humans’ ability to estimate stiffness based exclusively on the visual observation of motion. These insights could advance the enhancement of software package applications with the exact same functionality (e.g., using machine understanding techniques used to online video knowledge) and may possibly empower roboticists to establish enhanced movement management these kinds of that a robot’s intention is perceivable by human beings. An Accenture Fellowship will enable West to go on this perform, as nicely as new investigations into the performance of the human hand to support in the layout of a prosthetic hand that greater replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s operate has the potential to assistance major advances in robotics and rehabilitation technologies, with profound impacts on human well being and very well-remaining.
