Writing
Journal
First-person stories from a career spent in the seam between art and technology, from building loudspeakers by hand to painting with your mind.
From Saxophone to Speakers
Why a jazz kid who built speaker boxes by hand became an engineer, and why the artistic and technical paths were never really two paths.
Hardware Is Unforgiving, and That's the Point
Fixing an amplifier suspended 100 meters above a Broadway stage taught me what shipping hardware really means: get it right, because the physical world does not grade on a curve.
Say Yes, Then Find Another Way
My closest thing to a career philosophy: say yes so your network compounds, and when someone says no, treat it as a puzzle rather than a verdict.
Riding the Digital Wave: How I Moved From Analog to Software
From analog loudspeakers to DSP, FIR filters, and measuring sound for 80,000 people in a stadium: how I stepped onto the bridge from hardware into software.
Green Credits
Two electric cars, some of Australia's first charge points, and a small economy I invented to get Googlers to commute greener.
Riding a Bike for Google Maps
How I became the launch cyclist for Street View in Australia, pedalling a camera rig through Taronga Zoo to capture the places cars could never reach.
The Matrix in Beijing
A custom presentation tool, a room full of Chinese government officials, and a talk about the future of mobile that mattered more than most people in the room realised.
The Google Years, and Bringing the Ocean to a Billion People
Joining Google when it was tiny, launching YouTube across Asia, and taking Street View underwater to the coral reefs, an image now seen by over a billion people.
Building a Room That Did Not Exist Yet
At Jumptank I spent a year assembling a four-walled interactive tech hub from hardware that, in some cases, had not been invented.
A Robot Musician at the Sydney Opera House
How a collaborative robot with a boring life became an improvising musician on the Opera House stage, and how the project survived being cancelled twice.
Man and Machine, on Stage with Kasparov
Sharing a stage with the greatest chess player who ever lived, to debate the future of business between humans and machines.
Teaching a Robot to Play Jazz
My dream was to have a robot improvise jazz with a live band. In Chicago, with a hired trio and a lot of rehearsal tape, Baxter did exactly that.
Teaching Sophia to Sing
Giving the Hanson Robotics humanoid a singing voice with vibrato and imperfection, a duet with Jimmy Fallon, and rebuilding her arms to play piano.
Tesseract: Turning Music Into Paintings
Salvador Dali, a four-dimensional cube, NeurIPS papers, and the copyright question that reframed the robot as an instrument, not an author.
Painting With Your Mind
From music to brainwaves: building brain-control interfaces so people who have lost the ability to move can create again, and the mission behind Tesseract.
Swarm Robots, World Models, and What Comes Next
Where I place my bets in robotics: world models and 3D maps, self-assembling astrocyte swarms, and the idea that most of the future is already imagined.
Curiosity, and the People You Keep
There is no single source of knowledge, only curiosity and the people you surround yourself with. Advice for young builders: go where the action is.