This AI named me the 29th most influential woman in engineering from 2000-2020! It looked up frequency of my name being mentioned alongside an engineering discipline - so I suppose “Marita” and “robotics” for me. Very cool to be on a list alongside Helen Greiner, Mae C. Jemison, Anousheh Ansari, and Australia’s own Rose Amal.

From this Engineers Australia article:

the list [was] devised by machine-learning technology developed with funding from the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The algorithm accessed open-source data from billions of continuously updated data points in sources including Wikipedia and CrossRef, which reference papers, chapters, books and citations to the work of individual researchers around the world.

According to those behind Academic Influence, the method is not simply a popularity contest. It focuses on the intersection of name mentions and discipline mentions, so individuals are credited with “hits” only when their names also intersect with mentions of their field. Combined with other data, including the reach of their institution, the algorithm calculates an influence “score” for the researchers which determines their ranking.

You can see the full list here:  https://academicinfluence.com/rankings/people/influential-women-engineers#marita-cheng 

Here is our 8-degree-of-freedom robotic arm Jevaroo, pouring a glass of water and then moving around to show its range of movements!

The Hardy Group invited me to speak with them about healthcare, robotics and leadership.  Here I am riffing about those topics!

I’ve been giving a lot of virtual speaking gigs recently, so I created this short video to give a glimpse at what my virtual speeches are like.

We’re building a new robot Jevaroo, an 8-degree-of-freedom robot arm on a moveable platform, that can lift 1.32kg at full extension.  I love this little video we made with Jevaroo, showing it stretch its neck up and down!