The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technological innovation has selected 5 new study fellows for 2023-24. Now in its third 12 months, the initiative underscores the methods in which industry and analysis can collaborate to spur technological innovation.
By means of its partnership with the College of Engineering, Accenture offers 5 annual fellowships awarded to graduate college students with the intention of making powerful new insights on the convergence of organization and technological know-how with the likely to completely transform culture. The 2023-24 fellows will perform research in places which includes artificial intelligence, sustainability, and robotics.
The 2023-24 Accenture Fellows are:
Yiyue Luo
Yiyue Luo is a PhD candidate who is producing revolutionary integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, digital fabrication, and wise wearables. Her get the job done will take benefit of new improvements in digital production and AI, and the convergence in sophisticated sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable digital manufacturing, and rising computational tactics, with the purpose of producing novel sensing and actuation products that revolutionize interactions concerning men and women and their environments. In earlier projects, Luo has formulated tactile sensing attire which includes socks, gloves, and vests, as nicely as a workflow for computationally designing and digitally fabricating gentle textiles-based pneumatic actuators. With the assist of an Accenture Fellowship, she will progress her get the job done of combining sensing and actuating devices and take a look at the progress of haptic products that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her supreme aim is to construct a scalable, textile-centered, closed-loop human-device interface. Luo’s analysis holds enjoyable potential to advance ground-breaking applications for clever textiles, wellness care, synthetic and digital truth, human-machine interactions, and robotics.
Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD prospect whose investigation explores foundation styles, a class of styles that kinds the basis of transformative normal-purpose systems (GPTs) this kind of as GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will allow Munyikwa to carry out investigation aimed at illuminating the latest and probable affect of foundation products (which include huge language versions) on do the job and jobs prevalent to “high-skilled” knowledge employees in industries this sort of as advertising, legal companies, and medicine, in which foundation styles are anticipated to have significant economic and social impacts. A primary purpose of her task is to observe the effects of AI augmentation on jobs like copywriting and extended-variety creating. A next goal is to take a look at two main techniques that basis styles are driving the convergence of creative and technological industries, namely: lowering the cost of written content generation and enabling the growth of resources and platforms for instruction and schooling. Munyikwa’s get the job done has vital implications for the use of basis styles in numerous fields, from health treatment and education and learning to authorized expert services, business, and technological innovation.
Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD candidate in social engineering systems whose research explores human-AI collaboration with the aims of establishing a deeper knowledge of AI-based technologies (which include ChatGPT and DALL-E), analyzing their overall performance and evolution, and steering their growth towards societally useful programs, like weather improve mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will help Vaccaro’s current operate towards two essential objectives: pinpointing synergies concerning people and AI-centered application to assistance layout human-AI units that address persistent problems greater than existing techniques and investigating applications of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological improve, specifically for renewable electrical power systems. By integrating the historically distinctive domains of AI, devices engineering, and cognitive science with a huge assortment of industries, technological fields, and social programs, Vaccaro’s do the job has the likely to progress person and collective productiveness and creative imagination in all these regions.
Chonghuan Wang is a PhD applicant in computational science and engineering whose research employs statistical studying, econometrics principle, and experimental layout to produce successful, dependable, and sustainable discipline experiments in various domains. In his current do the job, Wang is applying statistical learning methods this kind of as on-line studying and bandit idea to take a look at the performance of new therapies, vaccinations, and overall health care interventions. With the assistance of an Accenture Fellowship, he will design experiments with the certain intention of knowledge the trade-off concerning the decline of a patient’s welfare and the accuracy of estimating the remedy result. The benefits of this investigation could assistance to help you save lives and consist of illness outbreaks all through pandemics like Covid-19. The added benefits of increased experiment design and style and the assortment of large-top quality details increase perfectly further than wellness treatment for illustration, these instruments could aid firms enhance user engagement, examination pricing impacts, and raise the usage of platforms and services. Wang’s exploration holds interesting probable to harness statistical discovering, econometrics idea, and experimental style in support of potent businesses and the higher social very good.
Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD candidate whose study seeks to enhance our knowledge of human motor handle and robotics. His work aims to progress rehabilitation technologies and prosthetic gadgets, as perfectly as improve robotic dexterity. His past perform has yielded important insights into the human skill to extract details solely from visual displays. Particularly, he demonstrated humans’ capability to estimate stiffness based mostly entirely on the visual observation of movement. These insights could advance the progress of application applications with the same capability (e.g., applying device finding out methods utilized to video data) and could empower roboticists to build increased motion control this sort of that a robot’s intention is perceivable by human beings. An Accenture Fellowship will allow West to carry on this work, as well as new investigations into the features of the human hand to help in the design of a prosthetic hand that greater replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s get the job done has the potential to assistance significant innovations in robotics and rehabilitation technologies, with profound impacts on human health and very well-remaining.
