engineering

Marita Cheng

Marita Cheng is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Marita Cheng rather than just read about it. In short: Marita Cheng (born 5 March 1989) is the founder of Robogals and co-founder of other companies. She was named the 2012 Young Australian of the Year.

Key takeaways

Marita Cheng belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Marita Cheng to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Marita Cheng from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Marita Cheng (born 5 March 1989) is the founder of Robogals and co-founder of other companies. She was named the 2012 Young Australian of the Year. She was named as one of the World's Top 50 women in Technology by Forbes in 2018 and was recognised on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2016. In 2019, Cheng was appointed a member of the Order of Australia for significant service to science and technology, particularly to robotics.

Early life and education Marita Cheng was born on 5 March 1989 in Cairns, north Queensland. She was raised by her mother, a single parent who worked as a hotel room cleaner, in a housing commission apartment in Queensland, Australia. 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. 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. Cheng later graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering in mechatronics and a Bachelor of Computer Science.

Career The robotics workshops developed into Robogals, founded in 2008 for the purpose of encouraging young women into careers in STEM fields. 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. In November 2011, Cheng was named Victorian Young Australian of the Year for 2012, and went on to be named as Young Australian of the Year. In that same year she was also a winner in the Financial Review – Westpac 100 Women of Influence awards' Young Leader category. Cheng visited China as part of the 40-Year Anniversary of Australia-China Diplomatic Relations, touring Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Tianjin and Beijing in 2012. In 2013 she established a start-up robotics company. She is the founder and current CEO of Aubot, a start-up robotics company. 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. 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, receiving TechCrunch coverage during her time at the program. The app won a CES Best of Innovation Award in 2017. Cheng co-led an Australian delegation of 50 entrepreneurs, industry representatives and government envoys, to Israel alongside Assistant Innovation Minister Wyatt Roy in 2015. She co-founded Aipoly, which launched in January 2016. Aipoly is an app to assist blind people to recognise objects using their mobile phones. Cheng returned to her robotics company, receiving a Myer Fellowship, and participated in the Advance Queensland Hot Desq program in 2017, relocating to Brisbane, Australia for 6 months, and the Austrade San Francisco Landing Pad in 2018, which brought her to San Francisco. From 2012 to 2018, Cheng served on the board of the Foundation for Young Australians. Cheng helped decide on startup investments alongside Eddie McGuire as a board member of RMIT University's New Enterprise Investment Fund (2014-2017), and supported the Victorian startup ecosystem as a board member of the Victorian State Innovation Expert Panel (2016-2018). She was also involved with the Clinton Health Access Initiative as Technology Advisory Board Member (2016-2017).

Public appearance Cheng has given two TEDx talks, and has been a featured speaker at MIT Technology Review Conference in Singapore, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the World Entrepreneurship Forum in Lyon, the Global Summit of Women in Tokyo, and the Girl Scout National Convention in Utah. 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, and in 2011, served as a judge on The New Inventors. She spoke alongside Ashton Kutcher at Lenovo's #TECHmyway. Cheng has been profiled in Vogue Australia, InStyle magazine, and The Australian Women's Weekly for her work as a technology entrepreneur. Cheng frequently attends events via her company's Teleport robot, using the device to meet Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex in 2018, to appear on a panel with Israel's Chief Scientist Avi Hasson, and to give a speech at Robogals' 10-year anniversary gala dinner.

Recognition and honours 2011 – Churchill Fellowship 2011 – Anita Borg Institute's Change Agent ABIE Award 2012 – Young Australian of the Year 2014 – RoboHub 25 Women in Robotics you need to know about 2014 – Global Engineering Deans Council Diversity Award 2016 – Forbes 30 Under 30 2016 – Asia Society's Asia Game Changer Award 2017 – American Australian Association Next Generation Leader 2018 – Forbes World's Top 50 Women in Technology 2018 – The NSW Award for Excellence in Women's Leadership 2019 – Member of the Order of Australia, for significant service to science and technology, particularly to robotics

References

External links Official website

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Marita Cheng

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Marita Cheng claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Marita Cheng before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Marita Cheng ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Marita Cheng

In research: Marita Cheng appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Marita Cheng in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Marita Cheng is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1989 births, Asia Game Changer Award winners, Australian people of Chinese descent, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Marita Cheng outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Marita Cheng in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Marita Cheng means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Marita Cheng out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Marita Cheng in simple terms?

Marita Cheng (born 5 March 1989) is the founder of Robogals and co-founder of other companies. She was named the 2012 Young Australian of the Year.

Why does Marita Cheng matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Marita Cheng?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Marita Cheng.