The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology has chosen three latest research projects that can receive support from the initiative. The research projects aim to speed up progress in meeting complex societal needs through latest business convergence insights in technology and innovation.

Established in MIT’s School of Engineering and now in its third yr, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative is furthering its mission to bring together technological experts from across business and academia to share insights and learn from each other. Recently, Thomas W. Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management, joined the initiative as its first-ever faculty lead. The research projects relate to a few of the initiative’s key focus areas: sustainability, digital health, and the long run of labor.

“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 deal with 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 latest research projects specializing in sustainability, digital health, and the long run of labor have the potential to assist guide and shape future innovations that can profit the way in which we work and live.”

The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative charter project researchers are described below.

Accelerating the journey to net zero with industrial clusters

Jessika Trancik is a professor on the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Trancik’s research examines the dynamic costs, performance, and environmental impacts of energy systems to tell climate policy and speed up useful and equitable technology innovation. Trancik’s project goals to discover how industrial clusters can enable firms to derive greater value from decarbonization, potentially making firms more willing to speculate within the clean energy transition.

To satisfy the ambitious climate goals which have been set by countries all over the world, rising greenhouse gas emissions trends should be rapidly reversed. Industrial clusters — geographically co-located or otherwise-aligned groups of firms representing a number of industries — account for a good portion of greenhouse gas emissions globally. With major energy consumers “clustered” in proximity, industrial clusters provide a possible platform to scale low-carbon solutions by enabling the aggregation of demand and the coordinated investment in physical energy supply infrastructure.

Along with Trancik, the research team working on this project will include Aliza Khurram, a postdoc in IDSS; Micah Ziegler, an IDSS research scientist; Melissa Stark, global energy transition services lead at Accenture; Laura Sanderfer, strategy consulting manager at Accenture; and Maria De Miguel, strategy senior analyst at Accenture.

Eliminating childhood obesity

Anette “Peko” Hosoi is the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering. A typical theme in her work is the basic study of shape, kinematic, and rheological optimization of biological systems with applications to the emergent field of sentimental robotics. Her project will use each data from existing studies and artificial data to create a return-on-investment (ROI) calculator for childhood obesity interventions in order that firms can discover earlier returns on their investment beyond reduced health-care costs.

Childhood obesity is simply too prevalent to be solved by a single company, industry, drug, application, or program. Along with the physical and emotional impact on children, society bears a value through excess health care spending, lost workforce productivity, poor school performance, and increased family trauma. Meaningful solutions require multiple organizations, representing different parts of society, working along with a typical understanding of the issue, the economic advantages, and the return on investment. ROI is especially difficult to defend for any single organization because investment and return will be separated by a few years and involve asymmetric investments, returns, and allocation of risk. Hosoi’s project will consider the incentives for a specific entity to speculate in programs so as to reduce childhood obesity.

Hosoi might be joined by graduate students Pragya Neupane and Rachael Kha, each of IDSS, as well a team 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, global health and public service research lead.

Generating progressive organizational configurations and algorithms for coping with the issue of post-pandemic employment

Thomas Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management on the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. His research focuses on how latest organizations will be designed to reap the benefits of the chances provided by information technology. Malone might be joined on this project by John Horton, the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Profession Development Professor on the MIT Sloan School of Management, whose research focuses on the intersection of labor economics, market design, and data systems. Malone and Horton’s project will look to reshape the long run of labor with the assistance of lessons learned within the wake of the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a serious disrupter of labor and employment, and it shouldn’t be in any respect obvious how governments, businesses, and other organizations should manage the transition to a desirable state of employment because the pandemic recedes. Using natural language processing algorithms reminiscent of GPT-4, this project will look to discover latest ways in which firms can use AI to raised match applicants to obligatory jobs, create latest varieties of jobs, assess skill training needed, and discover interventions to assist include women and other groups whose employment was disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

Along with Malone and Horton, the research team will include Rob Laubacher, associate director and research scientist on the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and Kathleen Kennedy, executive director on the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and senior director at MIT Horizon. The team will even include Nitu Nivedita, managing director of artificial intelligence at Accenture, and Thomas Hancock, data science senior manager at Accenture.