Marita Cheng

Last updated

Marita Cheng

AM
Born (1989-03-05) 5 March 1989 (age 34) [1]
Cairns, Queensland, Australia [2]
NationalityAustralian
OccupationEntrepreneur
Website maritacheng.com

Marita Cheng AM (born 5 March 1989) is the founder of Robogals. She was named the 2012 Young Australian of the Year. [3] She is the founder and current CEO of Aubot, a start-up robotics company. [4] She co-founded Aipoly, an app to assist blind people to recognise objects using their mobile phones. [5] She was named as one of the World's Top 50 women in Technology by Forbes in 2018 [6] and was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2016. [7] On 9 June 2019, Cheng was appointed a member of the Order of Australia for significant service to science and technology, particularly to robotics. [8]

Contents

Early life

Cheng was raised by her mother, a single parent [9] who worked as a hotel room cleaner, [10] in a housing commission apartment in Queensland, Australia. [9]

Career

In 2007, while at university, Cheng founded Nudge, a company which provided reminders by phone or text message to help people manage their prescription drug schedules. [10] She won a prize for the best undergraduate business at the University of Melbourne and then recruited friends to start designing workshops to teach girls about robotics. [5] This became Robogals, which was founded in 2008 [11] for the purpose of encouraging young women into careers in STEM fields. [10] Cheng later graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering in mechatronics and a Bachelor of Computer Science. [5]

In 2011, Cheng was awarded a Churchill Fellowship, which allowed her to visit the U.S., U.K., Germany and Jamaica to learn about international approaches to science education for young women. [12] In 2011, Cheng was also awarded the Anita Borg Institute's Change Agent ABIE Award. [13] [14]

In November 2011, Cheng was named Victorian Young Australian of the Year for 2012, [15] and went on to be named as Young Australian of the Year. [3] In that same year she was also a winner in the Financial Review – Westpac 100 Women of Influence awards' Young Leader category. [16]

Cheng visited China as part of the 40 Year Anniversary of Australia-China Diplomatic Relations, touring Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Tianjin and Beijing in 2012. [17]

In 2013 she established a start-up robotics company. [18]

Cheng delivered the closing keynote speech at the 35th World Congress of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts in Hong Kong in 2014. [19]

In 2015, Cheng attended Singularity University's flagship 10-week Graduate Studies Program, where she founded an app that uses AI to enable visually impaired people to recognize objects, [20] receiving TechCrunch coverage during her time at the program. [21] The app won a CES Best of Innovation Award in 2017. [22]

Cheng co-led an Australian delegation of 50 entrepreneurs, industry representatives and government envoys, to Israel alongside Assistant Innovation Minister Wyatt Roy in 2015. [23]

She co-founded Aipoly, which launched in January 2016. Aipoly is an app to assist blind people to recognise objects using their mobile phones. [5]

Cheng returned to her robotics company, receiving a Myer Fellowship, [24] and participated in the Advance Queensland Hot Desq program in 2017, relocating to Brisbane, Australia for 6 months, [25] and the Austrade San Francisco Landing Pad in 2018, which brought her to San Francisco. [26]

From 2012 to 2018, Cheng served on the board of the Foundation for Young Australians. [27] Cheng helped decide on startup investments alongside Eddie McGuire [28] as a board member of RMIT University's New Enterprise Investment Fund (2014-2017), [29] and supported the Victorian startup ecosystem as a board member of the Victorian State Innovation Expert Panel (2016-2018). [30] She was also involved with the Clinton Health Access Initiative as Technology Advisory Board Member (2016-2017). [31]

Public appearance

Cheng has given two TEDx talks, [32] [33] and has been a featured speaker at MIT Technology Review Conference in Singapore, [34] IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), [35] the World Entrepreneurship Forum in Lyon, the Global Summit of Women in Tokyo, [36] and the Girl Scout National Convention in Utah. [37]

She appeared live on TV as a panelist on ABC's Q&A, alongside Nobel laureates Brian Schmidt and Peter Doherty, Suzanne Cory and Chief Scientist of Australia Ian Chubb, [38] and in 2011, served as a judge on The New Inventors. [39] She spoke alongside Ashton Kutcher at Lenovo's #TECHmyway. [40]

Cheng has been profiled in Vogue Australia, [41] InStyle magazine, [42] and The Australian Women's Weekly for her work as a technology entrepreneur. [43]

Cheng frequently attends events via her company's Teleport robot, using the device to meet Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex in 2018, [44] to appear on a panel with Israel's Chief Scientist Avi Hasson, [45] [46] and to give a speech at Robogals' 10-year anniversary gala dinner. [47]

Awards and other accolades

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Greiner</span> American computer scientist, engineer

Helen Greiner is a co-founder of iRobot and former CEO of CyPhy Work, Inc., a start-up company specializing in small multi-rotor drones for the consumer, commercial and military markets. Ms Greiner is currently the CEO of Tertill Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ayanna Howard</span> American roboticist

Ayanna MacCalla Howard is an American roboticist, entrepreneur and educator currently serving as the dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University. Assuming the post in March 2021, Howard became the first woman to lead the Ohio State College of Engineering.

Amanda Susan Barnard is an Australian theoretical physicist working in predicting the real world behavior of nanoparticles using analytical models and supercomputer simulations and applied machine learning. Barnard is a pioneer in the thermodynamic cartography of nanomaterials, creating nanoscale phase diagrams relevant to different environmental conditions, and relating these to structure/property maps. Her current research involves developing and applying statistical methods and machine/deep learning in nanoscience and nanotechnology, and materials and molecular informatics. In 2014 she became the first person in the southern hemisphere, and the first woman, to win the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, which she won for her work on diamond nanoparticles.

Tania Karen de Jong is an Australian soprano, social entrepreneur, businesswoman, motivational speaker, and event producer. She is the Founder of Creative Innovation Global, Creative Universe, Creativity Australia, Dimension5, Music Theatre Australia, Pot-Pourri, and The Song Room, and co-founder of Mind Medicine Australia. De Jong was named as one of the "100 Most Influential People in Psychedelics" globally by Psychedelic Invest in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robogals</span>

Robogals is an international student-run organisation that aims to inspire, engage and empower young women to consider studying engineering and related fields. Its primary activity is interactive, engineering based workshops for girls aged between 8-18. Robogals has chapters at 31 universities across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Kenya, South Africa, New Zealand, Indonesia and the Philippines. These chapters fall into three regions - Robogals Asia Pacific, Robogals EMEA, and Robogals North America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Krisztina Holly</span> American engineer

Krisztina Holly, known by her colleagues as 'Z', is a Hungarian American innovator, entrepreneur, and adventurer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leslie Dewan</span> American nuclear engineer

Leslie Dewan is an American nuclear engineer. She was the co-founder and chief executive officer of Transatomic Power. Dewan was a member of the board of MIT and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rana el Kaliouby</span> Egyptian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur

Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur in the field of expression recognition research and technology development, which is a subset of facial recognition designed to identify the emotions expressed by the face. El Kaliouby's research moved beyond the field's dependence on exaggerated or caricatured expressions modeled by laboratory actors, to focus on the subtle glances found in real situations. She is the co-founder, with Rosalind Picard, and CEO of Affectiva.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kimberly Bryant (technologist)</span> African American electrical engineer

Kimberly Bryant is an American electrical engineer who worked in the biotechnology field at Genentech, Novartis Vaccines, Diagnostics, and Merck. In 2011, Bryant founded Black Girls Code, a nonprofit organization that focuses on providing technology and computer programming education to African-American girls. After founding Black Girls Code, Bryant was listed as one of the "25 Most Influential African-Americans In Technology" by Business Insider.

Pia Ednie-Brown is an Australian architectural theorist, researcher, and creative practitioner. She is also Professor of Architecture and Chair of Creative Practice Research at the School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. Pia maintains the creative research practice onomatopoeia, established in 2000, and leads the cross-institutional Affective Environments Laboratory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ashleigh McConnell</span> Australian Paralympic swimmer

Ashleigh Kate McConnell, is a limb deficient Paralympic swimmer of Australia. She represented Australia at the 2016 Rio Paralympics and the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics, where she won gold medals in freestyle relay events.

Uche Pedro is a Nigerian entrepreneur. She is the founder and CEO of BellaNaija, a media tech brand known for entertainment and lifestyle content. Under her leadership, BellaNaija's social footprint has grown through its collective brands - BellaNaija.com, BellaNaija Weddings and BellaNaija Style - to be the largest on the African continent with more than 200 million impressions each month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kate Devlin</span> Northern Irish computer scientist, AI specialist

Kate Devlin, born Adela Katharine Devlin is a Northern Irish computer scientist specialising in Artificial intelligence and Human–computer interaction (HCI). She is best known for her work on human sexuality and robotics and was co-chair of the annual Love and Sex With Robots convention in 2016 held in London and was founder of the UK's first ever sex tech hackathon held in 2016 at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London and is the author of Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots in addition to several academic papers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sophie Deen</span> Childrens author and coding educator

Sophie Deen is a British children's author and leader in the field of coding and STEM for young people. She is the CEO of Bright Little Labs, a kids media company that makes animations, books, games and toys with a focus on 21st century skills, inclusive role models, and sustainability.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natalie Panek</span> Canadian aerospace engineer

Natalie Panek is a Canadian working in aerospace engineering. She works in the robotics and automation division of the space technology company MDA.

Carol Elizabeth Reiley is an American business executive, computer scientist, and model. She is a pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems in surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue, and self-driving cars. Reiley has worked at Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. She co-founded, invested in, and was president of Drive.ai, and is now CEO of a healthcare startup, a creative advisor for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand ambassador for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is a published children's book author, the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine, and is ranked by Forbes, Inc, and Quartz as a leading entrepreneur and influential scientist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sharon Moore</span>

Sharon Anne Moore MBE is the Chief Technology Officer for Public Sector at IBM in the United Kingdom and Ireland. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2018 Birthday Honours.

Madhu Bhaskaran is an engineer and Professor at RMIT University. She co-leads the Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group at RMIT University She won the APEC Aspire prize in 2018 for her development of "electronic skin".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gitanjali Rao (inventor)</span> American inventor (born 2005)

Gitanjali Rao is an American inventor, author, social activist, and a STEM student and advocate. She won the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge in 2017 and was recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30 for her innovations. Rao was named Time's top young innovator of 2020 for her innovations and "innovation workshops" she conducts across the globe and, on December 4, 2020, was featured on the cover of Time and named their first "Kid of the Year".

Leanne Kemp is an Australian tech entrepreneur. She is the founder and CEO of Everledger and was Queensland Chief Entrepreneur.

References

  1. ↑ "myRobogals - Profile - Marita Cheng". my.robogals.org.
  2. ↑ Packham, Laura (26 January 2012). "Young Australian of the Year honour for Cairns girl Marita Cheng". The Cairns Post . Retrieved 3 February 2012.
  3. 1 2 "Marita Cheng". National Australia Day Council. Archived from the original on 6 August 2020. Retrieved 7 February 2022.
  4. ↑ "Aubot - About". 2018. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Blackwell, Geoff; Hobday, Ruth (2017). 200 women: who will change the way you see the world. Richmond, Victoria: Echo in association with Blackwell&Ruth. p. 367. ISBN   9781760408183.
  6. ↑ "The World's Top 50 Women in Tech". Forbes. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  7. ↑ Howard, Caroline. "30 Under 30 Discovering Brave New Worlds in Science And Healthcare". Forbes. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  8. ↑ "2019 Queen's Birthday Honours full list". Canberra Times. 9 June 2019. Retrieved 24 June 2022.
  9. 1 2 Katherine Firkin (15 September 2010). "Mum's little helper - Extraordinary citizens recognized for bravery". Herald Sun. p. 010.
  10. 1 2 3 Robyn Rankin (29 December 2010). "Marita Cheng". The Cairns Eye. p. 12.
  11. ↑ Bridie Smith (15 November 2011). "Rush in leading role among society's mentors". The Age. p. 5. The Victorian young Australian of the year was 22-year-old engineering student Marita Cheng, who founded Robogals Global in 2008 to encourage women to consider a career in the sciences
  12. ↑ "Quite a Fellow". The Cairns Sun. 13 July 2011. p. 1.
  13. ↑ "Abie Awards - AnitaB.org". Archived from the original on 7 August 2017. Retrieved 7 August 2017.
  14. ↑ "Marita Cheng - AnitaB.org". 1 October 2011.
  15. ↑ "Victorian Australian of the Year award recipients 2012 announced". Australianoftheyear.org. 14 November 2011. Archived from the original on 3 March 2014. Retrieved 27 February 2014.
  16. ↑ Upton, Louise (8 July 2013). "How Marita Cheng engineered success". Australian Financial Review. Archived from the original on 12 July 2013. Retrieved 27 February 2014.
  17. ↑ admin (16 January 2013). "Message from the Australian Ambassador to China: Celebrating 40 years". Australia China Connections. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  18. ↑ Pennington, Sylvia (19 September 2013). "What Marita Cheng did next". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 27 February 2014.
  19. ↑ "WAGGGS 35th World Congress program". Archived from the original on 14 July 2014. Retrieved 9 July 2014.
  20. ↑ "Marita Cheng: The Australian robotist helping blind people see with the click of a button". Advance. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  21. ↑ "Aipoly Puts Machine Vision in the Hands of the Visually Impaired". TechCrunch. 17 August 2015. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  22. ↑ "Aipoly Vision Wins the Best of Innovation Award at CES2017". COOL BLIND TECH. 6 January 2017. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  23. ↑ Mao, Frances (25 October 2015). "Wyatt Roy headed to start-up nation Israel". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  24. ↑ "2016 Myer Innovation Fellows Announced" . Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  25. ↑ Queensland, Advance (13 October 2017). "Robot Queen returns to Queensland". Medium. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  26. ↑ "Aubot- Australian Landing Pad Participant San Francisco - Australia Unlimited". www.australiaunlimited.com. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  27. ↑ "Young Australians Appointed to FYA Board | PBA". Pro Bono Australia. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  28. ↑ "RMIT invests $100,000 in four student start-ups - RMIT University". www.rmit.edu.au. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  29. ↑ "Entrepreneurs 'Start Up Nation' Innovation Delegation to Israel". www.spacecubed.com. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  30. ↑ "Victorian Innovation Takes An Expert Lead". Premier of Victoria. 12 February 2016. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  31. ↑ "Announcing Marita Cheng as ASCILITE keynote – ASCILITE 2017" . Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  32. ↑ TEDx Talks (14 May 2013), We Need to Teach Our Kids to be Makers: Marita Cheng at TEDxSydney , retrieved 19 March 2019
  33. ↑ TEDx Talks (22 August 2016), If the blind could see | Alberto Rizzoli and Marita Cheng | TEDxMelbourne , retrieved 19 March 2019
  34. ↑ "EmTech Singapore lifts the curtain on future technologies". Digital News Asia. 28 January 2015. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  35. ↑ "ICRA-X". IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2018. 11 January 2018. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  36. ↑ "2017 Summit Archive – Global Summit of Women" . Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  37. ↑ "World Conference – 2014". Girl Guides Australia. 11 October 2013. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  38. ↑ Science: Precious Petals to Passionate Teachers, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 15 September 2014, retrieved 20 March 2019
  39. ↑ "YOUNG ACHIEVERS AWARDS - 2013/2014". old.rotaryclubofmelbourne.org.au. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  40. ↑ Lenovo Australia and New Zealand (12 February 2015), 2015 #TECHmyway livestream live in Sydney Australia , retrieved 20 March 2019
  41. ↑ Clark, Lucie (31 May 2018). "Five lessons in tech success from entrepreneur Marita Cheng". Vogue.com.au. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  42. ↑ Cincotta, Katie (17 May 2015). "Win helps inventor Marita Cheng develop Teleroo robot". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  43. ↑ "Meet The Weekly's Women of the Future winners". Now To Love. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  44. ↑ "Young Victorians impress royal visitors". Special Broadcasting Service . 18 October 2018. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  45. ↑ "Israel's chief scientist to come face to face with Aussie robot". Australian Financial Review. 20 November 2015. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  46. ↑ "Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce". www.aicc.org.au. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  47. ↑ "Robogals 10th Anniversary Celebration – Robogals" . Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  48. ↑ "25 women in robotics you need to know about (2014) | Robohub" . Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  49. ↑ "'Robogal' Marita does it again". www.couriermail.com.au. 3 December 2014. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  50. ↑ "Australian engineer wins global diversity award". Australian Aviation. 5 December 2014. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  51. ↑ "Asia Society Honors I.M. Pei, Other 'Asia Game Changers' at United Nations". Asia Society. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
  52. ↑ "American Australian Association". www.americanaustralian.org. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
Awards
Preceded by Young Australian of the Year
2012		Succeeded by
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.