The MIT-Pillar AI Collective has introduced six fellows for the spring 2024 semester. With assist from this system, the graduate college students, who’re of their closing yr of a grasp’s or PhD program, will conduct analysis within the areas of AI, machine studying, and information science with the goal of commercializing their improvements.
Launched by MIT’s Faculty of Engineering and Pillar VC in 2022, the MIT-Pillar AI Collective helps school, postdocs, and college students conducting analysis on AI, machine studying, and information science. Supported by a present from Pillar VC and administered by the MIT Deshpande Middle for Technological Innovation, the mission of this system is to advance analysis towards commercialization.
The spring 2024 MIT-Pillar AI Collective Fellows are:
Yasmeen AlFaraj
Yasmeen AlFaraj is a PhD candidate in chemistry whose curiosity is within the utility of information science and machine studying to tender supplies design to allow next-generation, sustainable plastics, rubber, and composite supplies. Extra particularly, she is making use of machine studying to the design of novel molecular components to allow the low-cost manufacturing of chemically deconstructable thermosets and composites. AlFaraj’s work has led to the invention of scalable, translatable new supplies that might deal with thermoset plastic waste. As a Pillar Fellow, she is going to pursue bringing this expertise to market, initially specializing in wind turbine blade manufacturing and conformal coatings. By means of the Deshpande Middle for Technological Innovation, AlFaraj serves as a lead for a crew creating a spinout targeted on recyclable variations of current high-performance thermosets by incorporating small portions of a degradable co-monomer. As well as, she participated within the Nationwide Science Basis Innovation Corps program and just lately graduated from the Clear Tech Open, the place she targeted on enhancing her marketing strategy, analyzing potential markets, guaranteeing an entire IP portfolio, and connecting with potential funders. AlFaraj earned a BS in chemistry from College of California at Berkeley.
Ruben Castro Ornelas
Ruben Castro Ornelas is a PhD pupil in mechanical engineering who’s keen about the way forward for multipurpose robots and designing the {hardware} to make use of them with AI management options. Combining his experience in programming, embedded methods, machine design, reinforcement studying, and AI, he designed a dexterous robotic hand able to finishing up helpful on a regular basis duties with out sacrificing measurement, sturdiness, complexity, or simulatability. Ornelas’s modern design holds important business potential in home, industrial, and health-care functions as a result of it may very well be tailored to carry every little thing from kitchenware to delicate objects. As a Pillar Fellow, he’ll give attention to figuring out potential business markets, figuring out the optimum method for business-to-business gross sales, and figuring out essential advisors. Ornelas served as co-director of StartLabs, an undergraduate entrepreneurship membership at MIT, the place he earned an BS in mechanical engineering.
Keeley Erhardt
Keeley Erhardt is a PhD candidate in media arts and sciences whose analysis pursuits lie within the transformative potential of AI in community evaluation, notably for entity correlation and hidden hyperlink detection inside and throughout domains. She has designed machine studying algorithms to determine and observe temporal correlations and hidden alerts in large-scale networks, uncovering on-line affect campaigns originating from a number of nations. She has equally demonstrated the usage of graph neural networks to determine coordinated cryptocurrency accounts by analyzing monetary time sequence information and transaction dynamics. As a Pillar Fellow, Erhardt will pursue the potential business functions of her work, similar to detecting fraud, propaganda, cash laundering, and different covert exercise within the finance, power, and nationwide safety sectors. She has had internships at Google, Fb, and Apple and held software program engineering roles at a number of tech unicorns. Erhardt earned an MEng in electrical engineering and pc science and a BS in pc science, each from MIT.
Vineet Jagadeesan Nair
Vineet Jagadeesan Nair is a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering whose analysis focuses on modeling energy grids and designing electrical energy markets to combine renewables, batteries, and electrical autos. He’s broadly focused on creating computational instruments to deal with local weather change. As a Pillar Fellow, Nair will discover the applying of machine studying and information science to energy methods. Particularly, he’ll experiment with approaches to enhance the accuracy of forecasting electrical energy demand and provide with excessive spatial-temporal decision. In collaboration with Challenge Tapestry @ Google X, he’s additionally engaged on fusing physics-informed machine studying with typical numerical strategies to extend the velocity and accuracy of high-fidelity simulations. Nair’s work might assist understand future grids with excessive penetrations of renewables and different clear, distributed power assets. Exterior lecturers, Nair is lively in entrepreneurship, most just lately serving to to arrange the 2023 MIT International Startup Workshop in Greece. He earned an MS in computational science and engineering from MIT, an MPhil in power applied sciences from Cambridge College as a Gates Scholar, and a BS in mechanical engineering and a BA in economics from College of California at Berkeley.
Mahdi Ramadan
Mahdi Ramadan is a PhD candidate in mind and cognitive sciences whose analysis pursuits lie on the intersection of cognitive science, computational modeling, and neural applied sciences. His work makes use of novel unsupervised strategies for studying and producing interpretable representations of neural dynamics, capitalizing on current advances in AI, particularly contrastive and geometric deep studying strategies able to uncovering the latent dynamics underlying neural processes with excessive constancy. As a Pillar Fellow, he’ll leverage these strategies to realize a greater understanding of dynamical fashions of muscle alerts for generative motor management. By supplementing present spinal prosthetics with generative AI motor fashions that may streamline, velocity up, and proper limb muscle activations in actual time, in addition to probably utilizing multimodal vision-language fashions to deduce the sufferers’ high-level intentions, Ramadan aspires to construct actually scalable, accessible, and succesful business neuroprosthetics. Ramadan’s entrepreneurial expertise consists of being the co-founder of UltraNeuro, a neurotechnology startup, and co-founder of Presizely, a pc imaginative and prescient startup. He earned a BS in neurobiology from College of Washington.
Rui (Raymond) Zhou
Rui (Raymond) Zhou is a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering whose analysis focuses on multimodal AI for engineering design. As a Pillar Fellow, he’ll advance fashions that might allow designers to translate data in any modality or mixture of modalities into complete 2D and 3D designs, together with parametric information, part visuals, meeting graphs, and sketches. These fashions might additionally optimize current human designs to perform objectives similar to bettering ergonomics or decreasing drag coefficient. In the end, Zhou goals to translate his work right into a software-as-a-service platform that redefines product design throughout numerous sectors, from automotive to shopper electronics. His efforts have the potential to not solely speed up the design course of but in addition scale back prices, opening the door to unprecedented ranges of customization, concept technology, and speedy prototyping. Past his educational pursuits, Zhou based UrsaTech, a startup that integrates AI into training and engineering design. He earned a BS in electrical engineering and pc sciences from College of California at Berkeley.
