Launched in Oct 2020, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Field and Technological innovation is supposed to demonstrate how the convergence of industries and systems is powering the following wave of transform and innovation. The 5-yr initiative is designed to advance three main pillars: research, education and learning, and fellowships. As element of the third pillar, Accenture has awarded five fellowships to MIT graduate learners working on investigation in field and technological know-how convergence who are underrepresented, which includes by race, ethnicity and gender.
The recipients of the inaugural Accenture Fellows plan are working throughout disciplines together with electronics, textiles, equipment understanding, economics, and offer chain. Their exploration has the likely to advance innovation and technological innovation to impact industry convergence and to broaden the convergence process to just about all industries — by way of creative challenge-solving, the accelerated adoption of new systems, one of a kind collaborations, and imagining imaginatively and boldly.
“Accenture has prolonged targeted on how creativeness and ingenuity can assist clear up some of the world’s most complicated challenges. When we preferred to investigate the convergence of industry and engineering, we turned to MIT to prolong our longstanding partnership with education and learning, investigate, and fellowships that delved further into this matter,” claims Sanjeev Vohra, international guide of used intelligence at Accenture. “The Accenture Fellows awards underscore our powerful commitments to instruction, innovation, analysis and discovery, and building alternatives that will aid speed up the achievements of these potential champions of transform.”
Study staying carried out by the fellows handles an array of critical perform, including: developing robot-aided therapy to boost stability in impaired topics leveraging the growing availability of knowledge in the gig financial system using device studying to system locally produced waste for use as choice energy in low-cash flow municipalities analyzing operational issues that may occur from obstacles to extending credit score and sharing details amid offer chain associates and creating and making use of digital textile know-how to minimal-Earth orbit, prompting an opportunity for convergence among the electronics, textile, and place technological know-how industries.
“These fellows are prime illustrations of the extraordinary cross-disciplinary work happening at the nexus of sector and technology,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT College of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer system Science. “We are immensely grateful for Accenture’s commitment to our college students, and for their purpose of supporting and advancing college student innovation and discovery by these fellowships.”
University student nominations from every single unit within just the University of Engineering, as very well as from the 4 other MIT educational facilities and the MIT Schwartzman College of Computing, had been invited as portion of the application system. 5 outstanding learners ended up picked as the inaugural fellows of the initiative:
Jacqueline Baidoo is a PhD university student in the Division of Elements Science and Engineering, discovering plan linked to materials use. Exclusively, her investigation is concentrated on squander-to-power (WTE) methods that could be adopted at the municipal amount to handle and system regionally generated squander for use as different strength. Her goal is to use equipment discovering to minimize the barrier to entry of WTE methods in lower-cash flow municipalities through the growth of a instrument that informs municipal selections all-around squander administration and the development of WTE facilities. Baidoo gained a BS in chemistry and BA in physics from Xavier College of Louisiana and a BS in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Ga Tech.
Juliana Cherston is PhD pupil in the Media Lab. Her work in the Responsive Environments Group is focused on bringing electronic textile technologies to reduced-Earth orbit, prompting an opportunity for convergence among the electronics, textile, and house technological know-how industries. Precisely, she is augmenting massive place place fabrics with energetic sensory features, weaving vibration-sensitive piezoelectric fibers and charge-sensitive conductive yarns into these specialised supplies. Cherston attained a BA in physics and pc science from Harvard College.
Olumurejiwa Fatunde is a PhD scholar studying in the Center for Transportation and Logistics. Her study examines operational issues that may perhaps arise from boundaries to extending credit and sharing info between offer chain partners in casual settings. With the proliferation of novel payment platforms, cryptocurrency utilization, and pure language processing, Fatunde postulates that there is an possibility to push convergence across economical providers, telecommunications, and other purchaser-going through industries in emerging markets. Especially, she is investigating how technologies could trickle down to the smallest, least-formal businesses, aiding them to generate price for customers and to be a section of the worldwide financial state. Fatunde gained a BA in biomedical engineering from Harvard University and an MS in worldwide health and fitness policy from the London College of Economics in the U.K.
André Medeiros Sztutman is a PhD pupil in the Division of Economics. Leveraging the expanding availability of details in the gig overall economy, his function focuses on the enhancement of applications for tackling adverse collection in insurance policies markets. By producing instruments that make better use of info — primarily in cases wherever it is specially desired — he is contributing to the convergence of unique industries: gig platforms, reporting organizations, and the insurance coverage enterprise. Medeiros Sztutman gained a BS in economics from the Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil and an MS in economics from Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
Kaymie Shiozawa ’19 is a master’s scholar in the Section of Mechanical Engineering, checking out how robot-aided treatment could possibly deal with the obstacle of bettering equilibrium in impaired subjects. Drawing on her experience creating human matter experiments, applying equipment discovering and mathematical simulations, and coming up with complex mechanisms for robotics and healthcare products, Shiozawa aims to design and style a variable impedance cane and a novel protocol known as AdaptiveCane, which encourages unaided balance by progressively lessening the degree of aid offered as a user’s performance improves. Shiozawa gained an BS in mechanical engineering from MIT.
