Launched in October 2020, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology underscores the methods wherein business and know-how can collaborate to spur innovation. The five-year initiative goals to realize its mission via analysis, training, and fellowships. To that finish, Accenture has as soon as once more awarded 5 annual fellowships to MIT graduate college students engaged on analysis in business and know-how convergence who’re underrepresented, together with by race, ethnicity, and gender.
This yr’s Accenture Fellows work throughout analysis areas together with telemonitoring, human-computer interactions, operations analysis, AI-mediated socialization, and chemical transformations. Their analysis covers a wide selection of initiatives, together with designing low-power processing {hardware} for telehealth functions; making use of machine studying to streamline and enhance enterprise operations; enhancing psychological well being care via synthetic intelligence; and utilizing machine studying to know the environmental and well being penalties of advanced chemical reactions.
As a part of the appliance course of, scholar nominations had been invited from every unit inside the School of Engineering, in addition to from the Institute’s 4 different faculties and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Five distinctive college students had been chosen as fellows for the initiative’s third yr.
Drew Buzzell is a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering and pc science whose analysis issues telemonitoring, a fast-growing sphere of telehealth wherein info is collected via internet-of-things (IoT) linked units and transmitted to the cloud. Currently, the excessive quantity of knowledge concerned in telemonitoring — and the time and power prices of processing it — make information evaluation troublesome. Buzzell’s work is targeted on edge computing, a brand new computing structure that seeks to handle these challenges by managing information nearer to the supply, in a distributed community of IoT units. Buzzell earned his BS in physics and engineering science and his MS in engineering science from the Pennsylvania State University.
Mengying (Cathy) Fang is a grasp’s scholar within the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Her analysis focuses on augmented actuality and digital actuality platforms. Fang is growing novel sensors and machine parts that mix computation, supplies science, and engineering. Moving ahead, she’s going to discover subjects together with delicate robotics strategies that may very well be built-in with garments and wearable units and haptic suggestions so as to develop interactions with digital objects. Fang earned a BS in mechanical engineering and human-computer interplay from Carnegie Mellon University.
Xiaoyue Gong is a doctoral candidate in operations analysis on the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her analysis goals to harness the ability of machine studying and information science to scale back inefficiencies within the operation of companies, organizations, and society. With the assist of an Accenture Fellowship, Gong seeks to seek out options to operational issues by designing reinforcement studying strategies and different machine studying strategies to embedded operational issues. Gong earned a BS in honors arithmetic and interactive media arts from New York University.
Ruby Liu is a doctoral candidate in medical engineering and medical physics. Their analysis addresses the rising pandemic of loneliness amongst older adults, which results in poor well being outcomes and presents significantly excessive dangers for traditionally marginalized individuals, together with members of the LGBTQ+ neighborhood and folks of coloration. Liu is designing a community of interconnected AI brokers that foster connections between person and agent, providing psychological well being care whereas strengthening and facilitating human-human connections. Liu acquired a BS in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
Joules Provenzano is a doctoral candidate in chemical engineering. Their work integrates machine studying and liquid chromatography-high decision mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) to enhance our understanding of advanced chemical reactions within the surroundings. As an Accenture Fellow, Provenzano will construct upon current advances in machine studying and LC-HRMS, together with novel algorithms for processing actual, experimental HR-MS information and new approaches in extracting structure-transformation guidelines and kinetics. Their analysis may velocity the tempo of discovery within the chemical sciences and advantages industries together with oil and fuel, prescribed drugs, and agriculture. Provenzano earned a BS in chemical engineering and worldwide and world research from the Rochester Institute of Technology.