The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Marketplace and Know-how has chosen 5 new investigation fellows for 2023-24. Now in its 3rd year, the initiative underscores the means in which industry and exploration can collaborate to spur technological innovation.
Via its partnership with the University of Engineering, Accenture offers 5 annual fellowships awarded to graduate pupils with the aim of creating impressive new insights on the convergence of enterprise and technology with the possible to renovate society. The 2023-24 fellows will carry out analysis 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 establishing impressive integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, digital fabrication, and intelligent wearables. Her operate will take gain of current improvements in electronic manufacturing and AI, and the convergence in advanced sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable electronic producing, and emerging computational techniques, with the goal of producing novel sensing and actuation products that revolutionize interactions involving individuals and their environments. In past jobs, Luo has designed tactile sensing clothing such as socks, gloves, and vests, as nicely as a workflow for computationally building and digitally fabricating smooth textiles-dependent pneumatic actuators. With the assistance of an Accenture Fellowship, she will progress her do the job of combining sensing and actuating equipment and examine the development of haptic gadgets that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her greatest goal is to make a scalable, textile-based, shut-loop human-equipment interface. Luo’s exploration holds remarkable probable to progress ground-breaking apps for sensible textiles, wellbeing treatment, artificial and digital fact, human-equipment interactions, and robotics.
Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD prospect whose exploration explores foundation styles, a course of types that types the basis of transformative general-goal systems (GPTs) these as GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will enable Munyikwa to conduct analysis aimed at illuminating the latest and prospective effects of basis styles (including substantial language designs) on perform and duties typical to “high-skilled” information employees in industries these kinds of as marketing and advertising, authorized providers, and drugs, in which foundation styles are expected to have considerable financial and social impacts. A most important purpose of her task is to notice the effect of AI augmentation on jobs like copywriting and lengthy-type producing. A second goal is to take a look at two most important means that basis versions are driving the convergence of imaginative and technological industries, particularly: cutting down the price tag of articles generation and enabling the progress of tools and platforms for education and learning and schooling. Munyikwa’s function has critical implications for the use of basis products in a lot of fields, from health treatment and training to lawful expert services, business enterprise, and technological know-how.
Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD applicant in social engineering methods whose study explores human-AI collaboration with the plans of establishing a deeper comprehension of AI-dependent systems (such as ChatGPT and DALL-E), assessing their efficiency and evolution, and steering their advancement towards societally helpful purposes, like local weather adjust mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will assist Vaccaro’s present do the job towards two critical goals: identifying synergies between individuals and AI-based computer software to assistance style human-AI units that deal with persistent challenges far better than current techniques and investigating apps of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological modify, particularly for renewable electrical power technologies. By integrating the traditionally distinctive domains of AI, programs engineering, and cognitive science with a extensive array of industries, specialized fields, and social apps, Vaccaro’s perform has the possible to advance specific and collective productiveness and creativity in all these regions.
Chonghuan Wang is a PhD prospect in computational science and engineering whose exploration employs statistical mastering, econometrics concept, and experimental design and style to build productive, reliable, and sustainable field experiments in various domains. In his present-day do the job, Wang is applying statistical mastering procedures these as online learning and bandit theory to examination the usefulness of new solutions, vaccinations, and well being care interventions. With the support of an Accenture Fellowship, he will structure experiments with the unique aim of being familiar with the trade-off in between the decline of a patient’s welfare and the accuracy of estimating the remedy result. The success of this study could support to conserve life and have disorder outbreaks through pandemics like Covid-19. The advantages of enhanced experiment layout and the assortment of superior-excellent knowledge extend nicely over and above well being care for illustration, these equipment could assist companies enhance user engagement, exam pricing impacts, and boost the use of platforms and providers. Wang’s study holds fascinating likely to harness statistical mastering, econometrics idea, and experimental structure in help of potent corporations and the larger social fantastic.
Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD candidate whose research seeks to enhance our knowledge of human motor control and robotics. His function aims to advance rehabilitation technologies and prosthetic units, as nicely as improve robotic dexterity. His preceding get the job done has yielded beneficial insights into the human potential to extract data exclusively from visual shows. Specially, he demonstrated humans’ potential to estimate stiffness based mostly entirely on the visual observation of motion. These insights could advance the advancement of application applications with the similar functionality (e.g., using machine finding out solutions utilized to movie knowledge) and might help roboticists to acquire enhanced motion control these types of that a robot’s intention is perceivable by humans. An Accenture Fellowship will empower West to continue this get the job done, as nicely as new investigations into the functionality of the human hand to assist in the design of a prosthetic hand that greater replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s work has the potential to aid main advances in robotics and rehabilitation systems, with profound impacts on human wellbeing and perfectly-currently being.