• Mon. Feb 10th, 2025

2023-2024 Accenture Fellows advance engineering at the crossroads of enterprise and modern society | MIT Information

2023-2024 Accenture Fellows advance engineering at the crossroads of enterprise and modern society | MIT Information

The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Sector and Know-how has selected five new exploration fellows for 2023-24. Now in its third 12 months, the initiative underscores the methods in which sector and exploration can collaborate to spur technological innovation.

By its partnership with the School of Engineering, Accenture provides 5 annual fellowships awarded to graduate learners with the purpose of producing potent new insights on the convergence of business and technologies with the potential to change society. The 2023-24 fellows will perform investigate in regions like synthetic intelligence, sustainability, and robotics.

The 2023-24 Accenture Fellows are:

Yiyue Luo

Yiyue Luo is a PhD applicant who is acquiring ground breaking integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, digital fabrication, and clever wearables. Her function usually takes benefit of the latest advances in digital producing and AI, and the convergence in state-of-the-art sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable digital producing, and rising computational tactics, with the objective of creating novel sensing and actuation products that revolutionize interactions concerning individuals and their environments. In past initiatives, Luo has developed tactile sensing clothing together with socks, gloves, and vests, as properly as a workflow for computationally planning and digitally fabricating smooth textiles-dependent pneumatic actuators. With the assist of an Accenture Fellowship, she will progress her operate of combining sensing and actuating units and investigate the progress of haptic equipment that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her best purpose is to make a scalable, textile-based mostly, shut-loop human-equipment interface. Luo’s analysis retains enjoyable possible to advance floor-breaking purposes for sensible textiles, well being care, artificial and virtual truth, human-equipment interactions, and robotics.

Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD applicant whose exploration explores basis designs, a course of designs that forms the foundation of transformative typical-objective systems (GPTs) these kinds of as GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will help Munyikwa to carry out exploration aimed at illuminating the existing and probable impact of foundation products (such as significant language models) on get the job done and jobs prevalent to “high-skilled” information employees in industries these kinds of as marketing and advertising, authorized expert services, and medicine, in which basis styles are expected to have sizeable financial and social impacts. A major purpose of her task is to observe the effect of AI augmentation on duties like copywriting and long-kind crafting. A 2nd aim is to discover two principal ways that foundation models are driving the convergence of creative and technological industries, particularly: lowering the cost of articles technology and enabling the improvement of equipment and platforms for training and instruction. Munyikwa’s operate has important implications for the use of basis designs in quite a few fields, from overall health care and instruction to legal services, company, and know-how.

Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD prospect in social engineering programs whose investigation explores human-AI collaboration with the targets of developing a deeper being familiar with of AI-centered technologies (including ChatGPT and DALL-E), evaluating their functionality and evolution, and steering their enhancement towards societally advantageous programs, like weather transform mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will support Vaccaro’s recent function toward two critical aims: determining synergies between individuals and AI-primarily based software program to assistance layout human-AI techniques that handle persistent troubles improved than current strategies and investigating applications of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological alter, specifically for renewable vitality systems. By integrating the traditionally unique domains of AI, programs engineering, and cognitive science with a broad variety of industries, technical fields, and social applications, Vaccaro’s operate has the possible to progress particular person and collective efficiency and creative imagination in all these places.

Chonghuan Wang is a PhD applicant in computational science and engineering whose study employs statistical studying, econometrics theory, and experimental style and design to produce economical, dependable, and sustainable area experiments in a variety of domains. In his latest perform, Wang is applying statistical discovering strategies such as on the web finding out and bandit theory to check the effectiveness of new therapies, vaccinations, and well being care interventions. With the help of an Accenture Fellowship, he will layout experiments with the certain goal of understanding the trade-off amongst the decline of a patient’s welfare and the precision of estimating the treatment method effect. The outcomes of this research could help to preserve lives and incorporate ailment outbreaks during pandemics like Covid-19. The benefits of enhanced experiment layout and the collection of higher-top quality information prolong well further than well being treatment for example, these instruments could aid organizations optimize person engagement, check pricing impacts, and increase the use of platforms and products and services. Wang’s study holds enjoyable probable to harness statistical discovering, econometrics theory, and experimental design in help of potent firms and the increased social excellent.

Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD applicant whose analysis seeks to enhance our know-how of human motor command and robotics. His work aims to advance rehabilitation systems and prosthetic equipment, as nicely as strengthen robot dexterity. His prior do the job has yielded useful insights into the human ability to extract information entirely from visible shows. Exclusively, he shown humans’ capability to estimate stiffness based entirely on the visual observation of movement. These insights could advance the growth of software program purposes with the exact functionality (e.g., making use of machine mastering strategies utilized to video information) and may enable roboticists to create improved motion handle this kind of that a robot’s intention is perceivable by humans. An Accenture Fellowship will enable West to keep on this get the job done, as effectively as new investigations into the performance of the human hand to support in the design of a prosthetic hand that improved replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s do the job has the likely to assist significant advances in robotics and rehabilitation systems, with profound impacts on human overall health and very well-staying.