2023-2024 Accenture Fellows progress engineering at the crossroads of business enterprise and society | MIT News
The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Know-how has picked 5 new research fellows for 2023-24. Now in its third year, the initiative underscores the methods in which business and study can collaborate to spur technological innovation.
Through its partnership with the University of Engineering, Accenture gives 5 once-a-year fellowships awarded to graduate pupils with the goal of producing highly effective new insights on the convergence of company and technologies with the potential to remodel culture. The 2023-24 fellows will perform study in places which includes synthetic intelligence, sustainability, and robotics.
The 2023-24 Accenture Fellows are:
Yiyue Luo
Yiyue Luo is a PhD applicant who is developing modern integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, electronic fabrication, and good wearables. Her work takes benefit of new innovations in electronic producing and AI, and the convergence in innovative sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable electronic producing, and emerging computational techniques, with the objective of making novel sensing and actuation products that revolutionize interactions in between folks and their environments. In past tasks, Luo has made tactile sensing clothing such as socks, gloves, and vests, as nicely as a workflow for computationally creating and digitally fabricating soft textiles-dependent pneumatic actuators. With the assist of an Accenture Fellowship, she will progress her work of combining sensing and actuating gadgets and examine the development of haptic devices that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her supreme intention is to build a scalable, textile-primarily based, closed-loop human-device interface. Luo’s exploration holds remarkable opportunity to advance floor-breaking applications for intelligent textiles, health treatment, artificial and digital fact, human-device interactions, and robotics.
Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD prospect whose study explores foundation types, a course of designs that kinds the foundation of transformative standard-purpose systems (GPTs) these as GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will permit Munyikwa to conduct investigation aimed at illuminating the existing and prospective influence of basis styles (such as large language models) on perform and jobs widespread to “high-skilled” awareness staff in industries these as advertising and marketing, legal services, and medication, in which foundation designs are anticipated to have considerable financial and social impacts. A key intention of her challenge is to observe the effect of AI augmentation on tasks like copywriting and very long-sort composing. A second purpose is to explore two most important strategies that basis versions are driving the convergence of imaginative and technological industries, namely: decreasing the expense of information era and enabling the growth of tools and platforms for education and education. Munyikwa’s operate has critical implications for the use of basis versions in a lot of fields, from wellness care and education to lawful solutions, organization, and know-how.
Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD applicant in social engineering devices whose research explores human-AI collaboration with the ambitions of producing a deeper knowing of AI-dependent technologies (including ChatGPT and DALL-E), assessing their effectiveness and evolution, and steering their enhancement towards societally valuable programs, like local climate modify mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will help Vaccaro’s recent get the job done towards two key objectives: pinpointing synergies between individuals and AI-primarily based software to enable style and design human-AI systems that handle persistent difficulties much better than present strategies and investigating apps of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological adjust, exclusively for renewable electricity systems. By integrating the traditionally distinctive domains of AI, systems engineering, and cognitive science with a broad array of industries, technological fields, and social apps, Vaccaro’s perform has the prospective to progress particular person and collective efficiency and creativeness in all these spots.
Chonghuan Wang is a PhD candidate in computational science and engineering whose investigation employs statistical understanding, econometrics theory, and experimental design to develop productive, trusted, and sustainable industry experiments in several domains. In his current get the job done, Wang is implementing statistical finding out tactics these kinds of as online discovering and bandit theory to take a look at the usefulness of new treatment plans, vaccinations, and overall health care interventions. With the help of an Accenture Fellowship, he will style and design experiments with the distinct goal of comprehension the trade-off between the loss of a patient’s welfare and the accuracy of estimating the cure influence. The effects of this exploration could help to save lives and comprise disorder outbreaks through pandemics like Covid-19. The rewards of increased experiment design and the selection of high-excellent details prolong effectively outside of well being treatment for example, these applications could assist businesses enhance person engagement, check pricing impacts, and maximize the use of platforms and solutions. Wang’s investigate retains interesting possible to harness statistical discovering, econometrics theory, and experimental style and design in aid of strong companies and the better social good.
Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD applicant whose investigate seeks to greatly enhance our know-how of human motor regulate and robotics. His perform aims to advance rehabilitation systems and prosthetic units, as properly as strengthen robotic dexterity. His prior get the job done has yielded important insights into the human capacity to extract information only from visible shows. Precisely, he demonstrated humans’ potential to estimate stiffness based solely on the visual observation of movement. These insights could progress the advancement of program applications with the similar capacity (e.g., utilizing equipment mastering techniques applied to online video information) and may possibly help roboticists to produce increased motion regulate these kinds of that a robot’s intention is perceivable by human beings. An Accenture Fellowship will allow West to go on this operate, as nicely as new investigations into the features of the human hand to assist in the structure of a prosthetic hand that much better replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s perform has the probable to guidance main developments in robotics and rehabilitation technologies, with profound impacts on human well being and perfectly-remaining.
