Andreea Danielescu is the Director of the Future Technologies R&D group at Accenture Labs. Her group focuses on new emerging technologies that blend the physical and digital, including biotechnology, smart materials, energy harvesting and storage and neuromorphic computing. Her specific areas of expertise also include conversational and gestural interfaces, wearable technologies, and AI and tech ethics. Prior to Accenture she worked as an engineer and researcher on conversational interfaces at both Facebook and Intel. Danielescu received her bachelor’s in computer science and mathematics from University of Arizona and her PhD from Arizona State University in computer science with an arts, media, and engineering concentration. She holds over 10 patents, has over 50 peer reviewed publications and is a Senior Member of the ACM, a digital library that serves as a research, discovery and networking platform for computing educators, researchers, and professionals. Danielescu, a speaker at the XPANSE conference in Abu Dhabi Nov. 20-22, recently spoke to The Innovator about emerging technology trends and how to prepare for the future.
Q: Tell us about Accenture’s Future Technologies R&D group.
AD: The group is currently focusing on neuromorphic computing [ an approach to computing that uses physical artificial neurons to do computations, mimicking the human brain], smart materials and biomaterials. We work on Edge-based solutions that are low power, energy harnessing solutions and smart materials. It is part of a larger focus on sustainability. A lot of our clients are looking for alternatives to plastics and new packaging materials. We think about new designs, such as finding an alternative to glucose monitors or diabetic pumps that need to be returned for disassembly. We don’t have our own materials lab. We work a lot with university partners and run about 2 dozen projects at any given time.
Q: Can you give some examples of your projects?
AD: One example is dissolvable, degradable electronics. Advances in manufacturing methods for electronics most often aim to produce highly integrated and reliable devices for long-term use. While these features have brought benefits to customers, they also have many side effects. One of these is e-waste, which is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. Significant effort has been put toward e-waste recycling, but the composition of electronic devices makes the recycling process far more challenging than that of other materials like metals and cardboard. This is exacerbated by the increasing rate at which we produce smart devices, leading to much more e-waste than today’s recycling methods can handle.
In our work, we investigated how materials, fabrication tools and methods, and different types of destruction (melting, dissolving, etc.) can be combined to make devices with sustainability, transiency, and interactivity at the core. We worked on three practical approaches for building such devices including: laser-transferring edible gold foil onto 3D printed chocolates, inkjet printing conductive traces on water-soluble PVA sheets and fabricating electronic devices using natural beeswax.
An example I discussed during a panel at EXPANSE, is a seed carrier that can be dropped from drones and drill seeds into the soil to help with reforestation in areas where it is difficult or dangerous for humans to reach.
Another project involved leveraging the inherent material properties of natural materials, such as paper, leaf skeletons, and chitosan, along with silver nanowires, to create a new decomposable portable heater capable of being electrically controlled. This leaf powered heater can reach temperatures of >70°C and is flexible, lightweight, low-cost, and reusable. Use cases include heating snacks or beverages on the go or simple heating of wax strips for hair removal.
We are currently working on ways to create sensors out of textiles. Everything from sensing and actuation to the power and communications can be textile-based. The next step will be textile-based intelligence. Applications include biometrics for health and wellness embedded in your clothing. The more you know about your body the better off you are, MXenes, which were discovered in 2011 by Yury Gogotsi at Drexel University are finally approaching enough maturity to provide practical solutions to e-textiles that weren’t possible with only conductive copper or silver yarns. By creating fully textile-based systems you also eliminate the filaure points of hard (traditional electronics) to soft (textile) connections that have made many e-textiles impractical in the past.
Q: What changes do you see coming?
AD: In our conversations with clients, academia and the industry about what is top of mind we start to see trends and understand what people are worried about now. How will this change the market? Supply chain management and product authenticity for high-end goods and how we think about counterfeits need to be rethought.
This is not just a technology question. Ensuring ethical practices throughout the supply chain is dependent on humans. Unless multiple parties that don’t know each other have a vested interest in a particular outcome you will never have a neutral outcome. Tracking supply chains relies on a reporting structure that is reliant on people with vested interests, so it is a social problem just as much as a technological one.
More and more consumers are demanding ethically and sustainably sourced goods. How do you provide that information to your clients? How do you develop interactive elements into a product that can give detailed information? This all goes hand-in-hand with tracking things on the supply chain. We will see more and more companies adding interactive elements into products. An example of this would be a smart label on a wine bottle that uses near-field communication (NFC) on mobile phones to access a website about that wine, giving consumers much more information without adding package. An edible RFID sensor can be added to chocolate that allows consumers to scan it with their phone to enter a sweepstakes and win a ticket to an event.
NFC is built into everything so we can do this with what we have out there already. Printing gold leaf onto a chocolate bar can be done using very cheap materials that are readily available. Ubiquitous computing is already here. We just need to leverage what is already out there and add a little bit more.
Privacy and personalization will also become more important. Neuomorphic computing uses low latency and allows privacy preserving computing at the edge. If you don’t need to send information to the Cloud you can safeguard privacy and this will increase opportunities for personalized services. The ability to create a digital signature on textiles by varying pressure and tempo can provide solutions that are more robust to counterfeiting by providing more biomarkers for each person’s signature than is available today through touch screens.
As we reduce power usage requirements we can move more computational systems into the environment, improving efficiency and convenience while also protecting privacy. For example, low-power sensors can be used to structural health monitoring, providing early warnings of bridge failures. Low cost, degradable sensors can be used to help with crop management by providing real-time updates on soil and plant health and disease, allowing farmers to respond more quickly to changing conditions and increase the likelihood of good crop yields.
Personalization can also be applied to communication. The voices of digital assistants or on text-to-speech devices will be customized so that people – whether they are male or female or non-binary -can find voices that sound like them.
Q: Based on your experience, what is the best way for corporates to anticipate and prepare for the future?
AD: To prepare for the future you need dedicated resources. It can be challenging to justify but you need to properly resource a future-facing division and hire the right people. An interdisciplinary team is critical to this. R&D requires much longer cycles, on the order of three-to-five years minimum to explore a new area and start to develop applications and methods to scale the technology. Technology forecasting services can be helpful. Conversations with a wide range of researchers, clients, and subject matter experts in the industries of interest are also critical to identifying potential problems that could benefit from a novel solution and emerging technologies that are worth exploring. . R &D requires much longer cycles.
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