Supporting sustainability, digital health, and the future of work | MIT News

The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Business and Know-how has chosen three new analysis initiatives that can obtain help from the initiative. The analysis initiatives goal to speed up progress in assembly complicated societal wants by way of new enterprise convergence insights in expertise and innovation.

Established in MIT’s Faculty of Engineering and now in its third 12 months, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative is furthering its mission to convey collectively technological consultants from throughout enterprise and academia to share insights and study from each other. Not too long ago, Thomas W. Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Administration, joined the initiative as its first-ever school lead. The analysis initiatives relate to 3 of the initiative’s key focus areas: sustainability, digital well being, and the way forward for work.

“The options these analysis groups are creating have the potential to have super impression,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Pc Science. “They embody the initiative’s give attention to advancing data-driven analysis that addresses expertise and business convergence.”

“The convergence of science and expertise pushed by developments in generative AI, digital twins, quantum computing, and different applied sciences makes this an particularly thrilling time for Accenture and MIT to be enterprise this joint analysis,” says Kenneth Munie, senior managing director at Accenture Technique, Life Sciences. “Our three new analysis initiatives specializing in sustainability, digital well being, and the way forward for work have the potential to assist information and form future improvements that can profit the best way we work and dwell.”

The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative constitution challenge researchers are described under.

Accelerating the journey to internet zero with industrial clusters

Jessika Trancik is a professor on the Institute for Information, Methods, and Society (IDSS). Trancik’s analysis examines the dynamic prices, efficiency, and environmental impacts of vitality techniques to tell local weather coverage and speed up useful and equitable expertise innovation. Trancik’s challenge goals to determine how industrial clusters can allow firms to derive better worth from decarbonization, doubtlessly making firms extra keen to put money into the clear vitality transition.

To satisfy the formidable local weather targets which were set by international locations around the globe, rising greenhouse fuel emissions tendencies have to be quickly reversed. Industrial clusters — geographically co-located or otherwise-aligned teams of firms representing a number of industries — account for a good portion of greenhouse fuel 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.

Along with Trancik, the analysis staff engaged on this challenge will embody 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 elemental research of form, kinematic, and rheological optimization of organic techniques with purposes to the emergent subject of soppy robotics. Her challenge will use each knowledge from present research and artificial knowledge to create a return-on-investment (ROI) calculator for childhood weight problems interventions in order that firms can determine earlier returns on their funding past lowered health-care prices.

Childhood weight problems is just too prevalent to be solved by a single firm, business, drug, software, or program. Along with the bodily and emotional impression on youngsters, society bears a price by way of extra well being care spending, misplaced workforce productiveness, poor faculty efficiency, and elevated household trauma. Significant options require a number of organizations, representing totally different elements of society, working along with a standard understanding of the issue, the financial advantages, and the return on funding. ROI is especially tough to defend for any single group as a result of funding and return could be separated by a few years and contain uneven investments, returns, and allocation of threat. Hosoi’s challenge will contemplate the incentives for a specific entity to put money into applications in an effort to scale back childhood weight problems.

Hosoi will probably be joined by graduate college students Pragya Neupane and Rachael Kha, each of IDSS, as effectively a staff from Accenture that features Kenneth Munie, senior managing director at Accenture Technique, Life Sciences; Kaveh Safavi, senior managing director in Accenture Well being Business; and Elizabeth Naik, international well being and public service analysis lead.

Producing revolutionary organizational configurations and algorithms for coping with the issue of post-pandemic employment

Thomas Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Administration on the MIT Sloan Faculty of Administration and the founding director of the MIT Middle for Collective Intelligence. His analysis focuses on how new organizations could be designed to benefit from the chances supplied by data expertise. Malone will probably be joined on this challenge by John Horton, the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Profession Improvement Professor on the MIT Sloan Faculty of Administration, whose analysis focuses on the intersection of labor economics, market design, and knowledge techniques. Malone and Horton’s challenge will look to reshape the way forward for work with the assistance of classes discovered within the wake of the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a significant disrupter of labor and employment, and it’s not in any respect apparent how governments, companies, and different organizations ought to handle the transition to a fascinating state of employment because the pandemic recedes. Utilizing pure language processing algorithms reminiscent of GPT-4, this challenge will look to determine new ways in which firms can use AI to raised match candidates to needed jobs, create new varieties of jobs, assess talent coaching wanted, and determine interventions to assist embody girls and different teams whose employment was disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

Along with Malone and Horton, the analysis staff will embody Rob Laubacher, affiliate director and analysis scientist on the MIT Middle for Collective Intelligence, and Kathleen Kennedy, govt director on the MIT Middle for Collective Intelligence and senior director at MIT Horizon. The staff will even embody Nitu Nivedita, managing director of synthetic intelligence at Accenture, and Thomas Hancock, knowledge science senior supervisor at Accenture.

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