Maybe there was more to RTX than just a robot that could play a few games, or even more than a great research tool for Dad and his students. Those early experiences stayed with me. Over the years growing up, I never saw any robots as awesome as him or felt the same way towards any other piece of technology. He wasn’t just a robot. Whether he felt the connection or not – and I know that he couldn’t – I felt the connection. They were my experiences and memories, and within these memories lay something far more significant than a one-player computer game crossing over into the physical world.
These early experiences resulted in a young me longing to work in the field of robotics and AI. There was no real reason why, other than that’s what stayed with me. Despite managing to be accepted into a selective high school, I was an average student through all of it, often landing in the bottom half of my grade in exams. I think the problem was that I never really knew why I was learning what I was learning. A number of subjects like mathematics made no real-world sense to me. To be honest, I couldn’t care less if an unidentified boat randomly travels 10 nautical miles north then 15 nautical miles east and for some reason it’s up to me to figure out the direction and distance it now is from the starting point. Perhaps these sorts of problems intrigued you, but for me, not a chance. Sure, maybe if I were in that situation I’d find my way into reasoning out a solution. Maybe if it were somehow humanised, turned into some sort of adventure story, I could have gained even a sliver of interest in it. Inspiring the imagination is one of the most powerful human traits and we don’t harness it enough, so should teachers of such subjects take more time to devise exciting questions and scenarios?
Like many young people, I was convinced in high school that maths wouldn’t be of use to me in real life, so at the age of thirteen I questioned my maths teacher very directly about it. ‘Who is going to use any of this in the future? Apart from those who become maths teachers and teach this useless junk to the next generations of students?’ Even now, his answer seems bizarre. ‘You’re a tennis player right, Jordan? You’ll be calculating angles and stuff,’ he said as he made some convincing tennis swinging gestures to back up his rock-solid response. ‘That’s not how it works,’ I replied. We don’t need to know maths for these sorts of real-life physics calculations, our brain intuitively figures them out over time without necessarily understanding them. I’m sure many teachers today would provide a much better answer to this kind of question. But at the time his response only reinforced my belief that I was correct, there wasn’t any good clear use for maths in my future.
Nope. In fact, I couldn’t have been more incorrect! Mathematics forms the basis of so many things I do these days, and as soon as it became practical and necessary for me, I started to feel that it’s actually really interesting. Many recent times while working through design challenges, I’ve required equations we learnt back then seemingly only for exam-regurgitating purposes. And I think, Ah! That’s what that did!
One example was with an eye-tracker I had connected to my computer and was building an on-screen keyboard designed to work for Professor Stephen Hawking (while he was still alive) and for friends with similar conditions. The system allows people to type simply by moving their eyes, and adapts to slow and fast eye movements, allowing the user to advance their ability for speed. This can be a good option for communication for friends with severe physical disability who are non-verbal (unable to speak) yet always have a lot to say.
One of the first things I needed to do was to work out the speed of eye movement. The eye-tracker is bringing in 60 frames per second, so 60 times every second the device tells the computer where on the screen the position of the eyes are focused. If a friend moves their eyes quickly across the screen the speed has increased, but how do I find this from a bunch of (x, y) pixel coordinates that give me only the x position (the pixel number across from the left of the screen) and the y position (the pixel number up from the bottom of the screen in this application) at any given time?
I thought that first I should find the distance between pairs of consecutive points and as I knew the time that took (which was the same between every two consecutive points), I would therefore know the speed, because speed is simply distance divided by time (as when we describe a vehicle speed in kilometres per hour). Suddenly I realised that the distance between two points and calculating speed were a couple of things I learnt in maths and physics in school. Except here I had a reason to find them so they made more sense to me.
It was quite a different story back then in high school. Not only could I not envisage the future usefulness of maths, I couldn’t really think of life beyond school at all, and every time I tried, it was too much of a black hole in my mind. Any thoughts I had didn’t feel like they could actually eventuate, so moving into senior high school became quite stressful. I had very faint ideas of what I might like to become – a professional tennis player, an air force pilot and maybe later a commercial pilot, an engineer, a psychologist. What I usually envisaged was connection with people. Much as I thought about robotics and AI, my mathematics marks in school left a lot to be desired, so I didn’t believe I was cut out for it. Weighing up all my options, though, I really did like the thought of it. RTX and many other awesome projects I had seen Dad work on over the years inspired me, even if I was sure I could never work as hard as him. At the very least, it was a trajectory I could imagine.
When I reached Year 12, my classmates started to prepare to sit the NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC) and most of my friends were aiming for a UAI (University Admission Index – a standardised score between 0 and 100) in the high 90s. Our deputy principal took me aside to tell me I was on track for a 66 UAI if nothing improved. To work in robotics and AI, I wanted to study a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, which had a minimum UAI entrance score of 73. I still needed to lift my game. So I began to think big, seemingly for the first time in my life. I decided to aim for 90 – reminding myself of this goal by writing it on my books and placing sticky notes on my walls. Aiming this high meant that even if I fell short I could still get in to my course.
I worked incredibly hard throughout the year and achieved a UAI of 89.75. I had proven to myself the value of thinking big – and I got into my course. This process also sparked something new within me that would return again and again throughout my life. Ambition can be a powerful, positive thing – it doesn’t have to be negative. When I tell people these days that I work towards a higher quality of life for as many people as possible, and towards a better global future, that loftiness motivates me. It drives me on, through the days and weeks when things aren’t going as planned.
I began studying Electrical Engineering at UTS in 2003. I made some friends and had a blast as so many first-year students do, but by my second year I was already struggling. The maths and electronics were difficult and I just wasn’t getting it. As you’d expect, it was a different level from high school and I now found myself studying hard for a bare pass average by the end of second year. I just didn’t think I had it in me, so over a family dinner I told my dad I was going to drop out of engineering and possibly transfer to a course like psychology. I just knew I wanted to work with people. He insisted I stay a little longer, ‘Just one more semester. I’ll put aside more time and mentor you.’ I agreed and he spent more time with me. I acknowledge it was a lucky position to be in, having a father with such expertise in the field, but it was also extremely challenging at times when I’d struggle to wrap my head around the concepts or their implementation.
It was during this next semester that my life would be changed forever. My family and I were at a friend’s backyard pool party with a diving board, something I had never previously seen in a backyard. At the time it seemed like a good idea – I was thinking how much I love them and how creative we were going to get with our dives. It’s still all so vivid in my mind. After the first few dives we get more adventurous, attempting to flip and even running and jumping onto the board to gain distance. ‘Be careful,’ Mum warns. ‘I’ve got this, Mum. We’re diving in on an angle. It’s okay.’ Yeah, I’ve got this. But as I run-jump on the diving board to make a long-distance dive, the board breaks loose and shifts backwards, and I launch into the air with no sense of balance or up and down. As I hit the water I have my hands out in front of me, but the skewed take-off means I enter the water with my legs past vertical and I’m heading back in the direction I came from. Despite my hands being held out in front, my head suddenly slams into the concrete pool bottom first. I see a blast of light behind my eyeballs and hear a deafening crunch across the back of my neck. I’ve taken the blow directly on the top of my skull and it has jolted straight down my spine and sent a zap out into my hands. My first reaction is that I’ve broken my neck. I go very still and float to the surface of the pool, slowly ensuring that I can wriggle my toes, move my arms and clench my tingling hands.
I carefully bring myself out of the pool and walk over to Mum, holding my head up with my hands. ‘Uh, Mum . . . I think I might have broken my neck.’ In saying this, I realise how often I play tricks on my mum. But this time it’s not a trick. In fact, I’m feeling quite terrified about what I might have just done. ‘What? Really?’ she replies as I start to release my head from the support of my hands. I instantly feel my jelly-like neck give way as my head starts rolling left and back. My hands quickly reapply support and hold my head straight up again . . . and off to the hospital we go.
A few hours and tests later, we’ve found there are no breaks or fractures in my spine, but I have some minor tears to some of the muscles in my neck and it’s all tensing up something fierce. All in all, a lucky escape it seems. We’re told to head home and for me to get plenty of rest and see a physio soon. Once home I go to my room, feeling intense tightening in my neck muscles. They’ve gone really solid and my range of rotation is very narrow. Sitting on my bed I feel like this is as far as I’m able to move independently. My body won’t seem to let me lean back – each time I start trying, my neck gives a jolt of pain and I involuntarily sit back upright. I call my parents in to help. Dad seems really worried. I see a pair of socks on my bed (luckily clean ones), grab them, bite my teeth down and get my parents to quickly lower me back onto the pillow, supporting my neck and back as they do so.
This is it, the position I’ll be stuck in for the next 37 hours – a cycle of falling asleep, waking up from the pain in my neck and upper back, thinking this is all in my head and I’m overreacting, trying to sit back up and failing, struggling to roll over, not even being able to get up onto my side. I have never felt so helpless in my life.
It only takes four more days before I feel back to normal physically, but not mentally. That shock has given me a lot of time to think about the many things in my life I take for granted. Simple things like walking to the shops, running around the neighbourhood with my siblings and friends and even just moving around the house to get myself food or a drink when I feel like it. Even the potential of having that level of independence stripped away is a big wake-up call. What if the injury were permanent? What do other people do or have access to when that is the case?
I cannot get this out of my mind so I start looking into spinal cord injury, knowing nothing much about it. This research leads me further to the topic of disability in general. I delve deeper and find from the Bureau of Statistics that in my country alone, one in five Australians have some form of a disability and about 1.24 million Australians have severe or profound disability, always requiring assistance with communication, mobility or self-care. This is out of a population of about 20 million at the time. This shocking statistic hits me like a punch to the face. How can this be the case? That’s roughly one in sixteen Australians living with severe or profound disability. I don’t understand how this could be possible, and furthermore, I can’t believe I don’t know anyone who falls into this category of disability. Where is everyone?
That was my turning point. I continued to look into it and started learning the stories of individuals and reading more and more. One of the prominent people whose journey helped me understand the value and empowering nature of technology was Christopher Reeve. I grew up knowing of this American actor for his movie portrayal of the DC Comics superhero Superman. Everyone knew him as the classic star of the first big-budget Superman movies. But in 1995, Reeve was thrown from a horse during an equestrian competition and broke his neck. He would use a wheelchair for the rest of his life, along with a portable ventilator to help him breathe.
I started looking further into how Reeve controlled his wheelchair and found a range of methods already existed to control a power wheelchair. There was the standard joystick, and if you were unable to control that there was a version with the joystick in front of the face to be manoeuvred by the chin, called the chin stick. If this movement didn’t work for you, there was one more option available, the option Reeve used. It’s a device called the sip-and-puff, basically a tube near the mouth that you sip from or puff into using two different pressures each way, thus supplying a total of four controls to the wheelchair. At the time there were no further devices. I learnt stories of people with bright minds who could not use these available devices, meaning they had no options for independence in mobility.
This inspired me to aim at developing options for those missing links or at least to contribute towards their advancement. Mobility is such a fundamental level of independence to an individual and I was thinking about how much it meant to me, even though I was only stripped of it for such a short amount of time. What if robotics and AI could somehow be utilised to create new mobility options for the many people who couldn’t access what was currently available? The first thing I needed to do in order to increase my chances of getting to work on such technology was to improve my marks at university. Reflecting on these to date, I realised there was only the smallest chance – but a chance nonetheless – of working towards an honours year and maybe, just maybe, a PhD.
I began to think big again. I would need to work harder than I’d ever worked before to dig myself out of my current low average. I wanted to find a way. I wanted to commit to this goal. So over a family dinner I told Dad I was feeling inspired to work towards new mobility options, building my course to learn not only robotics and AI, but also towards biomedical and medical science and neuroscience. I wanted to follow in his footsteps and design systems that could make a difference. I said if all went well enough I might even consider doing a PhD. Thinking I might be met with an encouraging level of pride in my decision, I was taken aback when instead Dad, completely unconvinced my new-found energy would last, shot back, ‘Ha. You’ll need to get better than a pass for that.’ Void of the support I was seeking I let my gaze sink down to my dinner plate, shrinking down into my chair and feeling a little crushed. But you know what? He wasn’t being mean, he was being realistic.
Before letting my disappointment take hold, and quickly reminding myself that this new goal had been sparked from within me, I sat back up and confidently responded, ‘Don’t worry, I will.’ Don’t get me wrong, this burst of conviction was completely laced with self-doubt, but maybe reworking my inner confidence was exactly what I needed. I had discovered an overwhelming level of self-determination I had never previously felt. I had a reason. A purpose.
University became more difficult, while significantly more interesting. Everything I was learning now had a reason fuelling it, and I was always mentally applying it to the smart-wheelchair options I wanted to build in the years to come. I spent many long days and late nights alone, studying and designing, at university and in the library. I spent less time at home, where there was a plethora of distractions from siblings, TV and the bed that seemed to call out to me, letting me know how amazing sleep would be during the late nights when my attention and energy were starting to wane. In between all this, I worked a casual job as a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant and later part-time as a trainee engineer at an electronics automation company.
In a number of my classes I noticed two gents I hadn’t shared classes with before who always seemed to be really on top of things. They were mates who worked well together and actually wanted to get as much out of their studies as possible. I eventually met them, a spiky-haired Vietnamese international student, Minh, and a local Arabic loudmouth, Mina. I instantly loved their energy and we soon became a team who worked through most days and topics together. I had finally found my crew. Our personalities and skills complemented one another’s perfectly. Minh grasped complex concepts quickly but would often lose Mina when explaining them. I was in between and usually brought a different approach to understanding concepts, through analogies and rewording into humanised stories. This worked well for getting Mina across everything we were learning and what he brought to the table was meticulous organisational ability. He would basically project-manage Minh and me, breaking down all our projects and schedules and keeping us on track. He knew my calendar better than I did.
For the first time I learnt the immense value in true collaboration.