The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology has chosen three new analysis initiatives that can obtain assist from the initiative. The analysis initiatives goal to speed up progress in assembly advanced societal wants by way of new enterprise convergence insights in expertise and innovation.
Established in MIT’s School of Engineering and now in its third 12 months, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative is furthering its mission to convey collectively technological specialists from throughout enterprise and academia to share insights and be taught from each other. Recently, Thomas W. Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management, joined the initiative as its first-ever college lead. The analysis initiatives relate to a few of the initiative’s key focus areas: sustainability, digital well being, and the future of work.
“The solutions these research teams are developing have the potential to have tremendous impact,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “They embody the initiative’s focus on advancing data-driven research that addresses technology and industry convergence.”
“The convergence of science and technology driven by advancements in generative AI, digital twins, quantum computing, and other technologies makes this an especially exciting time for Accenture and MIT to be undertaking this joint research,” says Kenneth Munie, senior managing director at Accenture Strategy, Life Sciences. “Our three new research projects focusing on sustainability, digital health, and the future of work have the potential to help guide and shape future innovations that will benefit the way we work and live.”
The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative constitution venture researchers are described beneath.
Accelerating the journey to internet zero with industrial clusters
Jessika Trancik is a professor at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Trancik’s analysis examines the dynamic prices, efficiency, and environmental impacts of vitality programs to tell local weather coverage and speed up helpful and equitable expertise innovation. Trancik’s venture goals to establish how industrial clusters can allow corporations to derive better worth from decarbonization, probably making corporations extra keen to put money into the clear vitality transition.
To meet the formidable local weather targets which were set by international locations round the world, rising greenhouse gasoline emissions tendencies have to be quickly reversed. Industrial clusters — geographically co-located or otherwise-aligned teams of corporations representing a number of industries — account for a good portion of greenhouse gasoline emissions globally. With main vitality customers “clustered” in proximity, industrial clusters present a possible platform to scale low-carbon options by enabling the aggregation of demand and the coordinated funding in bodily vitality provide infrastructure.
In addition to Trancik, the analysis workforce engaged on this venture will embrace Aliza Khurram, a postdoc in IDSS; Micah Ziegler, an IDSS analysis scientist; Melissa Stark, international vitality transition companies lead at Accenture; Laura Sanderfer, technique consulting supervisor at Accenture; and Maria De Miguel, technique senior analyst at Accenture.
Eliminating childhood weight problems
Anette “Peko” Hosoi is the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering. A typical theme in her work is the elementary examine of form, kinematic, and rheological optimization of organic programs with purposes to the emergent subject of smooth robotics. Her venture will use each knowledge from current research and artificial knowledge to create a return-on-investment (ROI) calculator for childhood weight problems interventions in order that corporations can establish earlier returns on their funding past lowered health-care prices.
Childhood weight problems is simply too prevalent to be solved by a single firm, business, drug, utility, or program. In addition to the bodily and emotional impression on kids, society bears a price by way of extra well being care spending, misplaced workforce productiveness, poor faculty efficiency, and elevated household trauma. Meaningful options require a number of organizations, representing completely different elements of society, working along with a typical understanding of the downside, the financial advantages, and the return on funding. ROI is especially troublesome to defend for any single group as a result of funding and return might be separated by a few years and contain uneven investments, returns, and allocation of threat. Hosoi’s venture will take into account the incentives for a specific entity to put money into applications so as to scale back childhood weight problems.
Hosoi will likely be joined by graduate college students Pragya Neupane and Rachael Kha, each of IDSS, as effectively a workforce from Accenture that features Kenneth Munie, senior managing director at Accenture Strategy, Life Sciences; Kaveh Safavi, senior managing director in Accenture Health Industry; and Elizabeth Naik, international well being and public service analysis lead.
Generating revolutionary organizational configurations and algorithms for coping with the downside of post-pandemic employment
Thomas Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. His analysis focuses on how new organizations might be designed to take benefit of the prospects supplied by data expertise. Malone will likely be joined on this venture by John Horton, the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Career Development Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, whose analysis focuses on the intersection of labor economics, market design, and data programs. Malone and Horton’s venture will look to reshape the future of work with the assist of classes discovered in the wake of the pandemic.
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a serious disrupter of work and employment, and it isn’t in any respect apparent how governments, companies, and different organizations ought to handle the transition to a fascinating state of employment as the pandemic recedes. Using pure language processing algorithms comparable to GPT-4, this venture will look to establish new ways in which corporations can use AI to higher match candidates to needed jobs, create new sorts of jobs, assess talent coaching wanted, and establish interventions to assist embrace girls and different teams whose employment was disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
In addition to Malone and Horton, the analysis workforce will embrace Rob Laubacher, affiliate director and analysis scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and Kathleen Kennedy, government director at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and senior director at MIT Horizon. The workforce will even embrace Nitu Nivedita, managing director of synthetic intelligence at Accenture, and Thomas Hancock, knowledge science senior supervisor at Accenture.