2023-2024 Accenture Fellows advance technological know-how at the crossroads of enterprise and society | MIT News
The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Business and Know-how has chosen 5 new investigation fellows for 2023-24. Now in its 3rd yr, the initiative underscores the techniques in which business and investigate can collaborate to spur technological innovation.
Through its partnership with the University of Engineering, Accenture delivers five yearly fellowships awarded to graduate learners with the aim of producing strong new insights on the convergence of small business and engineering with the likely to renovate society. The 2023-24 fellows will perform investigate in places which include artificial intelligence, sustainability, and robotics.
The 2023-24 Accenture Fellows are:
Yiyue Luo
Yiyue Luo is a PhD candidate who is establishing revolutionary integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, digital fabrication, and good wearables. Her operate normally takes gain of current advancements in electronic manufacturing and AI, and the convergence in state-of-the-art sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable digital production, and emerging computational strategies, with the aim of building novel sensing and actuation units that revolutionize interactions in between individuals and their environments. In past initiatives, Luo has made tactile sensing attire such as socks, gloves, and vests, as nicely as a workflow for computationally creating and digitally fabricating soft textiles-centered pneumatic actuators. With the support of an Accenture Fellowship, she will advance her work of combining sensing and actuating equipment and check out the development of haptic devices that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her best purpose is to create a scalable, textile-based mostly, shut-loop human-device interface. Luo’s exploration holds enjoyable probable to advance floor-breaking apps for wise textiles, wellbeing care, synthetic and digital actuality, human-machine interactions, and robotics.
Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD prospect whose analysis explores basis models, a course of products that types the basis of transformative normal-reason systems (GPTs) this sort of as GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will permit Munyikwa to perform analysis aimed at illuminating the existing and potential influence of basis products (such as huge language products) on work and duties popular to “high-skilled” know-how staff in industries this kind of as promoting, lawful services, and drugs, in which foundation types are predicted to have important financial and social impacts. A major objective of her project is to observe the impact of AI augmentation on tasks like copywriting and prolonged-kind producing. A 2nd goal is to examine two main techniques that foundation versions are driving the convergence of artistic and technological industries, namely: lowering the expense of articles era and enabling the advancement of tools and platforms for education and learning and education. Munyikwa’s operate has critical implications for the use of basis types in a lot of fields, from wellbeing treatment and education to authorized solutions, organization, and engineering.
Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD applicant in social engineering systems whose study explores human-AI collaboration with the targets of establishing a further knowledge of AI-primarily based systems (which includes ChatGPT and DALL-E), analyzing their functionality and evolution, and steering their growth towards societally useful programs, like climate modify mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will aid Vaccaro’s existing perform towards two crucial aims: determining synergies involving human beings and AI-dependent software package to help style and design human-AI techniques that tackle persistent complications much better than present techniques and investigating programs of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological adjust, specially for renewable power technologies. By integrating the historically distinct domains of AI, programs engineering, and cognitive science with a wide selection of industries, technological fields, and social apps, Vaccaro’s perform has the likely to advance person and collective efficiency and creativity in all these places.
Chonghuan Wang is a PhD candidate in computational science and engineering whose investigation employs statistical studying, econometrics theory, and experimental layout to make successful, trusted, and sustainable subject experiments in numerous domains. In his latest perform, Wang is applying statistical mastering procedures such as online finding out and bandit theory to check the efficiency of new treatment plans, vaccinations, and wellbeing treatment interventions. With the assistance of an Accenture Fellowship, he will structure experiments with the particular aim of knowledge the trade-off involving the decline of a patient’s welfare and the precision of estimating the treatment outcome. The success of this investigation could assist to help save lives and comprise sickness outbreaks throughout pandemics like Covid-19. The added benefits of increased experiment style and design and the selection of substantial-high-quality knowledge increase effectively further than wellness care for case in point, these applications could support organizations enhance user engagement, exam pricing impacts, and enhance the use of platforms and products and services. Wang’s exploration holds remarkable potential to harness statistical understanding, econometrics theory, and experimental design in assist of solid organizations and the larger social very good.
Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD applicant whose investigate seeks to boost our expertise of human motor regulate and robotics. His work aims to advance rehabilitation technologies and prosthetic devices, as very well as increase robot dexterity. His prior work has yielded valuable insights into the human capacity to extract info only from visual shows. Specifically, he demonstrated humans’ means to estimate stiffness primarily based only on the visible observation of movement. These insights could advance the improvement of software package programs with the exact same capability (e.g., employing machine discovering techniques applied to video clip facts) and may enable roboticists to establish improved motion control this sort of that a robot’s intention is perceivable by individuals. An Accenture Fellowship will allow West to proceed this operate, as effectively as new investigations into the operation of the human hand to help in the layout of a prosthetic hand that greater replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s do the job has the opportunity to help major advances in robotics and rehabilitation technologies, with profound impacts on human wellness and properly-currently being.
