The MIT-Pillar AI Collective has introduced six fellows for the spring 2024 semester. With help from this system, the graduate college students, who’re of their ultimate yr of a grasp’s or PhD program, will conduct analysis within the areas of AI, machine studying, and knowledge science with the goal of commercializing their improvements.
Launched by MIT’s College of Engineering and Pillar VC in 2022, the MIT-Pillar AI Collective helps college, postdocs, and college students conducting analysis on AI, machine studying, and knowledge science. Supported by a present from Pillar VC and administered by the MIT Deshpande Heart 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 software of knowledge science and machine studying to delicate 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 would tackle thermoset plastic waste. As a Pillar Fellow, she is going to pursue bringing this know-how to market, initially specializing in wind turbine blade manufacturing and conformal coatings. By the Deshpande Heart for Technological Innovation, AlFaraj serves as a lead for a staff creating a spinout centered on recyclable variations of present 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 lately graduated from the Clear Tech Open, the place she centered on enhancing her marketing strategy, analyzing potential markets, making certain a whole 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 obsessed with 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 techniques, 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 progressive design holds important business potential in home, industrial, and health-care purposes as a result of it may very well be tailored to carry all the pieces from kitchenware to delicate objects. As a Pillar Fellow, he’ll deal with figuring out potential business markets, figuring out the optimum strategy 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, significantly for entity correlation and hidden hyperlink detection inside and throughout domains. She has designed machine studying algorithms to establish and observe temporal correlations and hidden indicators 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 establish coordinated cryptocurrency accounts by analyzing monetary time sequence knowledge and transaction dynamics. As a Pillar Fellow, Erhardt will pursue the potential business purposes of her work, comparable to detecting fraud, propaganda, cash laundering, and different covert exercise within the finance, vitality, 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 keen on creating computational instruments to sort out local weather change. As a Pillar Fellow, Nair will discover the appliance of machine studying and knowledge science to energy techniques. 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 Undertaking Tapestry @ Google X, he’s additionally engaged on fusing physics-informed machine studying with typical numerical strategies to extend the pace and accuracy of high-fidelity simulations. Nair’s work might assist understand future grids with excessive penetrations of renewables and different clear, distributed vitality assets. Outdoors lecturers, Nair is lively in entrepreneurship, most 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 vitality 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 latest advances in AI, particularly contrastive and geometric deep studying methods 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 indicators for generative motor management. By supplementing present spinal prosthetics with generative AI motor fashions that may streamline, pace 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 really 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 would allow designers to translate info in any modality or mixture of modalities into complete 2D and 3D designs, together with parametric knowledge, part visuals, meeting graphs, and sketches. These fashions might additionally optimize present human designs to perform targets comparable to bettering ergonomics or lowering drag coefficient. In the end, Zhou goals to translate his work right into a software-as-a-service platform that redefines product design throughout varied sectors, from automotive to shopper electronics. His efforts have the potential to not solely speed up the design course of but in addition cut back prices, opening the door to unprecedented ranges of customization, thought technology, and fast prototyping. Past his tutorial 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.