2023-2024 Accenture Fellows advance know-how at the crossroads of enterprise and modern society | MIT News

The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Sector and Technology has picked five new investigate fellows for 2023-24. Now in its third calendar year, the initiative underscores the means in which field and investigate can collaborate to spur technological innovation.

By means of its partnership with the University of Engineering, Accenture delivers 5 annual fellowships awarded to graduate learners with the intention of making powerful new insights on the convergence of business enterprise and technological know-how with the potential to renovate modern society. The 2023-24 fellows will conduct investigate in places which includes synthetic intelligence, sustainability, and robotics.

The 2023-24 Accenture Fellows are:

Yiyue Luo

Yiyue Luo is a PhD candidate who is establishing innovative integrations of tactile sensing and haptics, interactive sensing and AI, electronic fabrication, and clever wearables. Her perform usually takes edge of recent advances in electronic production and AI, and the convergence in superior sensing and actuation mechanisms, scalable electronic producing, and rising computational procedures, with the objective of building novel sensing and actuation devices that revolutionize interactions concerning folks and their environments. In past initiatives, Luo has made tactile sensing attire like socks, gloves, and vests, as effectively as a workflow for computationally creating and digitally fabricating gentle textiles-centered pneumatic actuators. With the support of an Accenture Fellowship, she will advance her perform of combining sensing and actuating gadgets and examine the growth of haptic products that simulate tactile cues captured by tactile sensors. Her ultimate aim is to construct a scalable, textile-primarily based, shut-loop human-machine interface. Luo’s research retains remarkable likely to advance floor-breaking apps for intelligent textiles, overall health treatment, artificial and virtual actuality, human-equipment interactions, and robotics.

Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD candidate whose study explores foundation types, a course of styles that varieties the foundation of transformative common-goal technologies (GPTs) these types of as GPT4. An Accenture Fellowship will help Munyikwa to carry out exploration aimed at illuminating the existing and prospective effects of basis models (such as significant language products) on get the job done and jobs prevalent to “high-skilled” knowledge personnel in industries this sort of as marketing and advertising, legal companies, and drugs, in which basis styles are anticipated to have considerable financial and social impacts. A primary aim of her venture is to observe the effects of AI augmentation on jobs like copywriting and very long-type composing. A 2nd intention is to explore two main techniques that basis designs are driving the convergence of innovative and technological industries, specifically: reducing the expense of content generation and enabling the advancement of equipment and platforms for training and training. Munyikwa’s get the job done has crucial implications for the use of basis styles in lots of fields, from well being care and education and learning to legal expert services, small business, and technology.

Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD applicant in social engineering programs whose investigation explores human-AI collaboration with the objectives of developing a deeper knowing of AI-primarily based systems (including ChatGPT and DALL-E), assessing their performance and evolution, and steering their progress towards societally useful apps, like climate modify mitigation. An Accenture Fellowship will support Vaccaro’s existing get the job done towards two essential goals: identifying synergies between individuals and AI-based application to assistance style and design human-AI methods that tackle persistent difficulties much better than present techniques and investigating purposes of human-AI collaboration for forecasting technological change, particularly for renewable vitality systems. By integrating the traditionally unique domains of AI, programs engineering, and cognitive science with a huge array of industries, specialized fields, and social programs, Vaccaro’s function has the potential to advance unique and collective efficiency and creativeness in all these regions.

Chonghuan Wang is a PhD prospect in computational science and engineering whose investigation employs statistical discovering, econometrics theory, and experimental style to produce effective, reputable, and sustainable discipline experiments in a variety of domains. In his existing do the job, Wang is applying statistical finding out approaches this kind of as on the web discovering and bandit concept to exam the usefulness of new solutions, vaccinations, and health and fitness treatment interventions. With the guidance of an Accenture Fellowship, he will structure experiments with the distinct goal of knowledge the trade-off in between the reduction of a patient’s welfare and the precision of estimating the treatment outcome. The final results of this analysis could assistance to save lives and comprise illness outbreaks throughout pandemics like Covid-19. The advantages of improved experiment structure and the assortment of high-top quality data prolong perfectly beyond wellbeing care for illustration, these instruments could help companies improve person engagement, take a look at pricing impacts, and improve the usage of platforms and providers. Wang’s investigation holds thrilling probable to harness statistical discovering, econometrics theory, and experimental structure in aid of strong enterprises and the greater social great.

Aaron Michael West Jr. is a PhD candidate whose investigate seeks to enhance our awareness of human motor control and robotics. His function aims to progress rehabilitation systems and prosthetic units, as perfectly as enhance robot dexterity. His past function has yielded worthwhile insights into the human capacity to extract facts only from visual displays. Specially, he demonstrated humans’ ability to estimate stiffness primarily based only on the visible observation of motion. These insights could progress the enhancement of program programs with the identical functionality (e.g., using equipment learning solutions utilized to video clip details) and may possibly help roboticists to acquire improved movement handle such that a robot’s intention is perceivable by humans. An Accenture Fellowship will help West to continue on this function, as nicely as new investigations into the functionality of the human hand to aid in the structure of a prosthetic hand that far better replicates human dexterity. By advancing understandings of human bio- and neuro-mechanics, West’s work has the likely to guidance big advancements in robotics and rehabilitation technologies, with profound impacts on human well being and perfectly-becoming.