2023-2024 Accenture Fellows progress technological innovation at the crossroads of business and society | MIT Information

The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Marketplace and Technology has picked five new analysis fellows for 2023-24. Now in its third yr, the initiative underscores the ways in which marketplace and study can collaborate to spur technological innovation.

By means of its partnership with the University of Engineering, Accenture provides 5 once-a-year fellowships awarded to graduate pupils with the purpose of generating powerful new insights on the convergence of small business and technology with the prospective to remodel society. The 2023-24 fellows will carry out exploration in spots which include artificial intelligence, sustainability, and robotics.

The 2023-24 Accenture Fellows are:

Yiyue Luo

Yiyue Luo is a PhD candidate who is producing modern integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, electronic fabrication, and good wearables. Her get the job done requires advantage of latest improvements in electronic production and AI, and the convergence in innovative sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable electronic manufacturing, and rising computational approaches, with the aim of building novel sensing and actuation equipment that revolutionize interactions concerning folks and their environments. In past projects, Luo has designed tactile sensing clothing including socks, gloves, and vests, as properly as a workflow for computationally developing and digitally fabricating delicate textiles-centered pneumatic actuators. With the guidance of an Accenture Fellowship, she will advance her function of combining sensing and actuating products and discover the enhancement of haptic units that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her best purpose is to make a scalable, textile-dependent, shut-loop human-machine interface. Luo’s study holds fascinating likely to progress floor-breaking programs for sensible textiles, health and fitness treatment, artificial and virtual fact, human-device interactions, and robotics.

Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD candidate whose study explores foundation versions, a class of products that types the foundation of transformative standard-objective systems (GPTs) these types of as GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will allow Munyikwa to conduct study aimed at illuminating the recent and likely impression of foundation products (which includes massive language versions) on get the job done and tasks common to “high-skilled” expertise personnel in industries these types of as marketing and advertising, lawful solutions, and medication, in which foundation types are anticipated to have substantial economic and social impacts. A principal goal of her venture is to observe the impression of AI augmentation on tasks like copywriting and very long-type creating. A 2nd goal is to check out two principal methods that foundation styles are driving the convergence of resourceful and technological industries, namely: lessening the price of content era and enabling the growth of equipment and platforms for schooling and training. Munyikwa’s get the job done has crucial implications for the use of foundation styles in numerous fields, from health and fitness treatment and instruction to legal services, organization, and technology.

Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD prospect in social engineering programs whose investigate explores human-AI collaboration with the ambitions of producing a further knowing of AI-dependent technologies (such as ChatGPT and DALL-E), assessing their general performance and evolution, and steering their development towards societally advantageous programs, like climate improve mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will guidance Vaccaro’s present get the job done towards two important objectives: figuring out synergies between individuals and AI-based mostly software program to enable design and style human-AI devices that tackle persistent complications much better than existing strategies and investigating applications of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological adjust, especially for renewable electrical power technologies. By integrating the historically unique domains of AI, systems engineering, and cognitive science with a broad array of industries, technical fields, and social applications, Vaccaro’s work has the possible to progress unique and collective efficiency and creative imagination in all these places.

Chonghuan Wang is a PhD candidate in computational science and engineering whose investigation employs statistical learning, econometrics theory, and experimental style and design to build efficient, dependable, and sustainable industry experiments in several domains. In his present work, Wang is making use of statistical discovering approaches such as on line learning and bandit theory to exam the effectiveness of new therapies, vaccinations, and overall health care interventions. With the assist of an Accenture Fellowship, he will structure experiments with the specific aim of knowing the trade-off between the loss of a patient’s welfare and the precision of estimating the therapy outcome. The final results of this analysis could support to save lives and contain disease outbreaks in the course of pandemics like Covid-19. The advantages of improved experiment design and the collection of higher-high-quality data increase very well beyond well being care for case in point, these resources could enable firms enhance user engagement, exam pricing impacts, and raise the utilization of platforms and providers. Wang’s investigation holds interesting likely to harness statistical mastering, econometrics concept, and experimental layout in aid of strong companies and the larger social great.

Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD candidate whose exploration seeks to enhance our understanding of human motor control and robotics. His operate aims to progress rehabilitation technologies and prosthetic units, as very well as increase robot dexterity. His earlier operate has yielded precious insights into the human capacity to extract facts exclusively from visible shows. Specifically, he shown humans’ means to estimate stiffness primarily based only on the visible observation of movement. These insights could progress the advancement of software package applications with the exact same ability (e.g., utilizing device finding out solutions utilized to video facts) and may well help roboticists to establish increased movement handle this sort of that a robot’s intention is perceivable by human beings. An Accenture Fellowship will empower West to go on this work, as nicely as new investigations into the features of the human hand to assist in the structure of a prosthetic hand that greater replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s get the job done has the potential to assist main advancements in robotics and rehabilitation technologies, with profound impacts on human wellness and well-becoming.