The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Business and Expertise has chosen 5 new analysis fellows for 2023-24. Now in its third yr, the initiative underscores the methods wherein trade and analysis can collaborate to spur technological innovation.
By its partnership with the College of Engineering, Accenture supplies 5 annual fellowships awarded to graduate college students with the intention of producing highly effective new insights on the convergence of enterprise and expertise with the potential to rework society. The 2023-24 fellows will conduct analysis in areas together with synthetic intelligence, sustainability, and robotics.
The 2023-24 Accenture Fellows are:
Yiyue Luo
Yiyue Luo is a PhD candidate who’s growing modern integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, digital fabrication, and good wearables. Her work takes benefit of current advances in digital manufacturing and AI, and the convergence in superior sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable digital manufacturing, and rising computational strategies, with the purpose of making novel sensing and actuation units that revolutionize interactions between folks and their environments. In previous initiatives, Luo has developed tactile sensing attire together with socks, gloves, and vests, in addition to a workflow for computationally designing and digitally fabricating mushy textiles-based pneumatic actuators. With the help of an Accenture Fellowship, she’s going to advance her work of mixing sensing and actuating units and discover the event of haptic units that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her final intention is to construct a scalable, textile-based, closed-loop human-machine interface. Luo’s analysis holds thrilling potential to advance ground-breaking purposes for good textiles, well being care, synthetic and digital actuality, human-machine interactions, and robotics.
Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD candidate whose analysis explores basis fashions, a category of fashions that types the idea of transformative general-purpose applied sciences (GPTs) corresponding to GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will allow Munyikwa to conduct analysis geared toward illuminating the present and potential affect of basis fashions (together with massive language fashions) on work and duties widespread to “high-skilled” data staff in industries corresponding to advertising, authorized providers, and drugs, wherein basis fashions are anticipated to have important financial and social impacts. A major purpose of her mission is to look at the affect of AI augmentation on duties like copywriting and long-form writing. A second intention is to discover two major ways in which basis fashions are driving the convergence of artistic and technological industries, particularly: lowering the price of content material technology and enabling the event of instruments and platforms for training and coaching. Munyikwa’s work has vital implications for the usage of basis fashions in lots of fields, from well being care and training to authorized providers, enterprise, and expertise.
Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD candidate in social engineering techniques whose analysis explores human-AI collaboration with the targets of growing a deeper understanding of AI-based applied sciences (together with ChatGPT and DALL-E), evaluating their efficiency and evolution, and steering their improvement towards societally helpful purposes, like local weather change mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will help Vaccaro’s present work towards two key goals: figuring out synergies between people and AI-based software program to assist design human-AI techniques that handle persistent issues higher than present approaches; and investigating purposes of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological change, particularly for renewable vitality applied sciences. By integrating the traditionally distinct domains of AI, techniques engineering, and cognitive science with a variety of industries, technical fields, and social purposes, Vaccaro’s work has the potential to advance particular person and collective productiveness and creativity in all these areas.
Chonghuan Wang is a PhD candidate in computational science and engineering whose analysis employs statistical studying, econometrics concept, and experimental design to create environment friendly, dependable, and sustainable area experiments in varied domains. In his present work, Wang is making use of statistical studying strategies corresponding to on-line studying and bandit concept to check the effectiveness of latest therapies, vaccinations, and well being care interventions. With the help of an Accenture Fellowship, he’ll design experiments with the particular intention of understanding the trade-off between the lack of a affected person’s welfare and the accuracy of estimating the therapy impact. The outcomes of this analysis may assist to avoid wasting lives and comprise illness outbreaks throughout pandemics like Covid-19. The advantages of enhanced experiment design and the gathering of high-quality information lengthen nicely past well being care; for instance, these instruments may assist companies optimize person engagement, take a look at pricing impacts, and enhance the utilization of platforms and providers. Wang’s analysis holds thrilling potential to harness statistical studying, econometrics concept, and experimental design in help of sturdy companies and the larger social good.
Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD candidate whose analysis seeks to boost our data of human motor management and robotics. His work goals to advance rehabilitation applied sciences and prosthetic units, in addition to enhance robotic dexterity. His earlier work has yielded worthwhile insights into the human skill to extract data solely from visible shows. Particularly, he demonstrated people’ skill to estimate stiffness primarily based solely on the visible statement of movement. These insights may advance the event of software program purposes with the identical functionality (e.g., utilizing machine studying strategies utilized to video information) and should allow roboticists to develop enhanced movement management such {that a} robotic’s intention is perceivable by people. An Accenture Fellowship will allow West to proceed this work, in addition to new investigations into the performance of the human hand to assist within the design of a prosthetic hand that higher replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s work has the potential to help main advances in robotics and rehabilitation applied sciences, with profound impacts on human well being and well-being.
