I am just an ordinary person, if but a little restless.
I build robots by trade, and I genuinely love what I am doing.
It all started when I was still in college — after a curious childhood of building working models for science projects. Not to mention also reading a ton of books.
At the University of Washington, I took a class in Artificial Intelligence to get myself ready for a capstone course in Robotics, aka my final research project before graduating.
Back then, A.I. had not been commercialized yet, and was certainly not a marketing buzzword like it is today. A hipster way to put it would be, “I entered the field way before it was cool.”
Recently, I had the opportunity to share my backstory at a startup event organized by Hong Kong’s Cyberport. I am going to retell it here.
While a research student, I would often stay late in the computer lab, working on an older version of the Sony Aibo dog.
The collective goal was to prepare a team of Aibo dogs for RoboCup soccer games by programming A.I. components into them.
I was a part of the team that was responsible for the robot dogs’ pathfinding — finding the most effective path to reach the ball, avoiding obstacles and opponents, and what have you.
Our labs were equipped with motion-sensitive lights, which means if no motion was detected for a while, the lights would automatically switch off to save power.
As you could probably imagine, that could become a tiny nuisance — especially for someone who’s just sitting in front of a computer, focusing on coding and not wanting to move around a lot.
So I made a harmless hack with what I had at hand. As a side experiment, I programmed one of the robot dogs (we named her Polly) to walk back and forth at regular times.
It worked like a charm!
This self-professed success — while couldn’t be more trivial — paved the way for my motivation to solve real-world problems.
Solving Real-World Problems
Whenever I see a disaster being reported in the news, a few reminders would run through my head (and heavy heart):
- Life is short. We really should be focusing our energy on what truly matters to us.
- Expanding on #1: Materialistic possessions don’t matter in the end, if at all. That being said, I think having some feel-good items to boost morale and drive motivation is perfectly fine.
- Don’t delay your dream. Take action towards it.
- There is almost always something we can do to help in tragic situations. Every bit counts. Like #3, we just need to take that first step.
Shortly after London’s Grenfell fire, I penned an article urging tech leaders to dedicate some of their powerful resources to assist rescue efforts in disasters.
The piece, entitled “Could Tech Leaders Have Assisted in the Grenfell Inferno Rescue?”, can be found here.
And now, I have decided to take matters into my own hands as well.
That’s largely why I am building rescue robots today.
The future is full of uncertainties. But I am stepping into it with my head up, as well as with all of you who support me one way or another.
Technology has the power to bring good to humanity, while at the same time is also capable of doing the complete opposite.
I chose to stick with the former.
