2023-2024 Accenture Fellows progress engineering at the crossroads of enterprise and culture | MIT News

The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Marketplace and Technological know-how has picked 5 new analysis fellows for 2023-24. Now in its third yr, the initiative underscores the methods in which industry and investigation can collaborate to spur technological innovation.

As a result of its partnership with the Faculty of Engineering, Accenture offers five annual fellowships awarded to graduate students with the purpose of generating powerful new insights on the convergence of business enterprise and technologies with the likely to transform culture. The 2023-24 fellows will perform analysis in locations such as synthetic intelligence, sustainability, and robotics.

The 2023-24 Accenture Fellows are:

Yiyue Luo

Yiyue Luo is a PhD prospect who is building progressive integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, digital fabrication, and smart wearables. Her work normally takes gain of modern advancements in digital producing and AI, and the convergence in state-of-the-art sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable digital producing, and emerging computational strategies, with the target of creating novel sensing and actuation units that revolutionize interactions between folks and their environments. In earlier assignments, Luo has developed tactile sensing clothing together with socks, gloves, and vests, as properly as a workflow for computationally coming up with and digitally fabricating tender textiles-centered pneumatic actuators. With the assist of an Accenture Fellowship, she will advance her work of combining sensing and actuating devices and check out the improvement of haptic devices that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her top aim is to establish a scalable, textile-centered, closed-loop human-machine interface. Luo’s exploration retains remarkable probable to progress ground-breaking purposes for clever textiles, wellbeing treatment, artificial and virtual reality, human-device interactions, and robotics.

Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD prospect whose investigation explores basis types, a course of products that sorts the foundation of transformative normal-function systems (GPTs) these types of as GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will enable Munyikwa to carry out study aimed at illuminating the present-day and possible effects of basis models (which include massive language designs) on work and responsibilities frequent to “high-skilled” information staff in industries these as marketing and advertising, authorized companies, and medicine, in which foundation versions are envisioned to have major financial and social impacts. A primary intention of her challenge is to notice the impact of AI augmentation on jobs like copywriting and extensive-kind writing. A second aim is to examine two main means that basis designs are driving the convergence of creative and technological industries, particularly: cutting down the value of articles era and enabling the growth of tools and platforms for education and training. Munyikwa’s function has critical implications for the use of foundation models in lots of fields, from health and fitness care and schooling to lawful expert services, small business, and technological know-how.

Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD candidate in social engineering methods whose exploration explores human-AI collaboration with the plans of establishing a deeper being familiar with of AI-based mostly systems (including ChatGPT and DALL-E), evaluating their functionality and evolution, and steering their progress toward societally beneficial apps, like weather improve mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will assist Vaccaro’s existing function toward two important targets: figuring out synergies amongst individuals and AI-based software to assist style and design human-AI methods that address persistent issues superior than existing techniques and investigating apps of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological modify, exclusively for renewable electricity technologies. By integrating the traditionally unique domains of AI, methods engineering, and cognitive science with a broad array of industries, technological fields, and social purposes, Vaccaro’s do the job has the probable to progress particular person and collective efficiency and creativity in all these parts.

Chonghuan Wang is a PhD prospect in computational science and engineering whose research employs statistical studying, econometrics idea, and experimental design to create effective, dependable, and sustainable area experiments in a variety of domains. In his latest work, Wang is making use of statistical learning approaches this sort of as online mastering and bandit principle to check the effectiveness of new therapies, vaccinations, and overall health care interventions. With the guidance of an Accenture Fellowship, he will style experiments with the distinct purpose of comprehension the trade-off involving the loss of a patient’s welfare and the accuracy of estimating the remedy result. The results of this analysis could enable to help save life and comprise illness outbreaks for the duration of pandemics like Covid-19. The benefits of increased experiment style and design and the selection of superior-high quality info increase very well over and above health and fitness treatment for case in point, these resources could enable corporations enhance person engagement, exam pricing impacts, and increase the usage of platforms and solutions. Wang’s exploration holds fascinating prospective to harness statistical learning, econometrics idea, and experimental layout in aid of powerful firms and the larger social good.

Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD applicant whose investigation seeks to enrich our knowledge of human motor command and robotics. His operate aims to progress rehabilitation technologies and prosthetic products, as nicely as improve robot dexterity. His preceding perform has yielded valuable insights into the human capability to extract data exclusively from visible displays. Particularly, he shown humans’ ability to estimate stiffness centered entirely on the visible observation of motion. These insights could advance the advancement of application programs with the exact capacity (e.g., working with machine learning solutions applied to video clip facts) and may perhaps permit roboticists to acquire improved movement handle these types of that a robot’s intention is perceivable by individuals. An Accenture Fellowship will permit West to continue this perform, as effectively as new investigations into the performance of the human hand to help in the style and design of a prosthetic hand that far better replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s function has the likely to support big innovations in robotics and rehabilitation systems, with profound impacts on human health and fitness and properly-being.