The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology has announced five recent research fellows for 2023-24. Now in its third yr, the initiative underscores the ways wherein industry and research can collaborate to spur technological innovation.
Through its partnership with the School of Engineering, Accenture provides five annual fellowships awarded to graduate students with the aim of generating powerful recent insights on the convergence of business and technology with the potential to rework society. The 2023-24 fellows will conduct research in areas including artificial intelligence, sustainability, and robotics.
The 2023-24 Accenture Fellows are:
Yiyue Luo
Yiyue Luo is a PhD candidate who’s developing progressive integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, digital fabrication, and smart wearables. Her work takes advantage of recent advances in digital manufacturing and AI, and the convergence in advanced sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable digital manufacturing, and emerging computational techniques, with the goal of making novel sensing and actuation devices that revolutionize interactions between people and their environments. In past projects, Luo has developed tactile sensing apparel including socks, gloves, and vests, in addition to a workflow for computationally designing and digitally fabricating soft textiles-based pneumatic actuators. With the support of an Accenture Fellowship, she is going to advance her work of mixing sensing and actuating devices and explore the event of haptic devices that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her ultimate aim is to construct a scalable, textile-based, closed-loop human-machine interface. Luo’s research holds exciting potential to advance ground-breaking applications for smart textiles, health care, artificial and virtual reality, human-machine interactions, and robotics.
Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD candidate whose research explores foundation models, a category of models that forms the premise of transformative general-purpose technologies (GPTs) comparable to GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will enable Munyikwa to conduct research aimed toward illuminating the present and potential impact of foundation models (including large language models) on work and tasks common to “high-skilled” knowledge staff in industries comparable to marketing, legal services, and medicine, wherein foundation models are expected to have significant economic and social impacts. A primary goal of her project is to watch the impact of AI augmentation on tasks like copywriting and long-form writing. A second aim is to explore two primary ways in which foundation models are driving the convergence of creative and technological industries, namely: reducing the fee of content generation and enabling the event of tools and platforms for education and training. Munyikwa’s work has vital implications for using foundation models in lots of fields, from health care and education to legal services, business, and technology.
Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD candidate in social engineering systems whose research explores human-AI collaboration with the goals of developing a deeper understanding of AI-based technologies (including ChatGPT and DALL-E), evaluating their performance and evolution, and steering their development toward societally helpful applications, like climate change mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will support Vaccaro’s current work toward two key objectives: identifying synergies between humans and AI-based software to assist design human-AI systems that address persistent problems higher than existing approaches; and investigating applications of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological change, specifically for renewable energy technologies. By integrating the historically distinct domains of AI, systems engineering, and cognitive science with a big selection of industries, technical fields, and social applications, Vaccaro’s work has the potential to advance individual and collective productivity and creativity in all these areas.
Chonghuan Wang is a PhD candidate in computational science and engineering whose research employs statistical learning, econometrics theory, and experimental design to create efficient, reliable, and sustainable field experiments in various domains. In his current work, Wang is applying statistical learning techniques comparable to online learning and bandit theory to check the effectiveness of recent treatments, vaccinations, and health care interventions. With the support of an Accenture Fellowship, he’ll design experiments with the particular aim of understanding the trade-off between the lack of a patient’s welfare and the accuracy of estimating the treatment effect. The outcomes of this research could help to save lots of lives and contain disease outbreaks during pandemics like Covid-19. The advantages of enhanced experiment design and the gathering of high-quality data extend well beyond health care; for instance, these tools could help businesses optimize user engagement, test pricing impacts, and increase the usage of platforms and services. Wang’s research holds exciting potential to harness statistical learning, econometrics theory, and experimental design in support of strong businesses and the greater social good.
Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD candidate whose research seeks to reinforce our knowledge of human motor control and robotics. His work goals to advance rehabilitation technologies and prosthetic devices, in addition to improve robot dexterity. His previous work has yielded helpful insights into the human ability to extract information solely from visual displays. Specifically, he demonstrated humans’ ability to estimate stiffness based solely on the visual remark of motion. These insights could advance the event of software applications with the identical capability (e.g., using machine learning methods applied to video data) and should enable roboticists to develop enhanced motion control such that a robot’s intention is perceivable by humans. An Accenture Fellowship will enable West to proceed this work, in addition to recent investigations into the functionality of the human hand to assist within the design of a prosthetic hand that higher replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s work has the potential to support major advances in robotics and rehabilitation technologies, with profound impacts on human health and well-being.
