I’m spending my week at Northcott’s Design Thinking School in Sydney. It is run by two members of faculty from Stanford’s Design School. I learnt about it through Lee Carpenter, COO of Northcott, who I met during my days of meandering around the country (before and after speaking engagements), visiting disability organisations and individuals with a disability to speak with about Jeva.

I gave a speech to about 20 people at Northcott when I visited there in late 2013.

Day 1 of Designing Thinking School, two concepts I liked follows.

The Point of View (POV) exercise. You go out and talk to people. Afterwards, you finish the following sentences.
We met…
We were surprised to learn…
We wonder if this means…
It seems like they need a way to…

The other activity I enjoyed was the Empathy Map. After reflecting on the user’s POV, break up your thoughts about the user into an Empathy Map. What the user…

I like attending courses like this every now and again to give me ideas that I can take back to my team so that my team and I may be more efficient operators.

An important problem in assistive aid technology is the lack of intuitive control interfaces.

So over the past few months, 2Mar Robotics has created Android control for our robotic arm, as well as two different types of gyroscopic headset controls, using Epson’s Moverio.

We also began our second round of Beta trials in all these control interfaces using our university student peers.

The G20 Leaders Summit was held in Brisbane on November 15 and 16. In order to broaden the discussion of important global issues, a new program called the Global Café was created. The Global Café was a global thought leadership forum based around a two-day event on November 12 and 13 (immediately before the G20 meeting).

I was invited by Professor Ian Frazer, a Brisbane-based researcher whose world-renowned work has centred on vaccines for the prevention and treatment of cervical cancer, to give a 4-minute talk on “Improving Human Life”, where I shared on the functionality and the latest developments of Jeva.

I attended the one-day Stanford-Berkeley Robotics Symposium at Stanford University in California. It was a fantastic opportunity to learn about what top researchers are interested in and working on.

I also happened to meet our motor suppliers there, (by sheer coincidence!), met up with some old robot-building buddies from Berkeley, and chatted with a mentor of ours for several hours, which gave me lots of clarity with some technical questions we had. All in all, a fantastic event and a good chance to catch up with our friends in the robotics industry! (Our mentor is in the far right in the photo below!)

I was honoured to be flanked by two Nobel Laureates (Peter Doherty and Brian Schmidt) on Tony Jones’ Q&A on ABC. The others who joined us at the table were Chief Scientist of Australia Ian Chubb and distinguished Australian molecular biologist Suzanne Cory. I’ve never sat on such an illustrious panel before in my life!

Here’s a segment of my appearance! And the entire show!

This is a blast form the past! Here was Marita showing the current Federal Member for Wentworth, and the Minister for Communications, Malcolm Turnbull, Jeva the robot arm. This photo was taken by the Head of Engineering at Google Australia, Alan Noble. Alan’s also on the Board of #startupAUS, which does great work in promoting startups in Australia. And Deb Noller, the awesome entrepreneur behind Switch Automation, is also in the shot. We were in Canberra launching Australia’s Innovation Generation in March this year.

Jeva the robot arm was included in a list of trials that Victorian medical researchers are working on in the recent Herald Sun weekend newspaper.