You can never plan for everything.
There's always a point where it's time to stop talking and start doing.
I can't imagine how anybody passes a problem
that they know that they can fix, and doesn't try to fix it.
I feel an absolute obligation to serve.
Military service in my family goes all the way back to
the Civil War and World War II, Vietnam.
There was never a moment where I thought I wouldn't become a soldier.
I did two tours in Iraq as a helicopter pilot.
But then I got injured.
One day you're a soldier, and then overnight
they rip off that tag and slap veteran on your chest.
And they don't really tell you what veteran means.
What is a veteran, what is it going to be to be a veteran?
- He was an amazing pilot.
He was literally pulled out of Iraq
and dropped home, with three kids.
Before I went in the military,
math was the thing where people were like:
"Hey, you are really, really good at this."
It's the thing that helps me understand the universe.
I thought: "Okay, I'll go get a physic degree of some kind."
He couldn't do it. The-- the-- he couldn't get the math right
and he said things were just getting jumbled up in his head.
I was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.
Some people call it concussion syndrome.
I missed math, I mean I loved just doing math
for the sake of doing math.
And so, I retaught myself a new way of doing math.
I went back and started from literally elementary school level math,
addition and subtraction type stuff.
I applied to Pitt and was accepted to the engineering program
and I wanted to see if I could be involved as an engineer
in helping veterans, and helping the people I care about.
- A roast with potatoes and bacon.
Is that my job?
That's your job for the time being here.
The fact that my son has autism is just one little part of him.
But almost his entire existence is defined by that autism.
- What do you want?
Tristan is pretty much non verbal.
-What? -Tristan.
Okay, if you're done buddy, you're done.
But I'm sure that he has dreams and aspirations just like everybody else.
It's hard to want so badly to know what they're thinking
and to not be able to.
I found there was a field called rehabilitation engineering.
It's technologies that improve people's quality of life
and their independence.
I thought: "Man, if my son's ever going to be independent,
he's going to have to have these kind of things around him."
If you look up rehabilitation engineering,
the first thing that pops up is a place near Pittsburgh,
and I thought: "Man, I got to go be a part of that."
[laughter]
It's kind of like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
except for it's robots instead of Oompa Loompas.
Our vision is a world where everyone with a disability
can participate on a level playing field
to their greatest extent possible.
The human, the right thing to do is to make things
not just able to be used, but to be used
with the same sort of joy or ease as I do.
We want to lift people up to be at eye level
with the person they're having a conversation with.
Climb a curb without it being this huge, drawn-out, dramatic thing
because the curb cut is not anywhere nearby.
To create an arm that can open a door, but also grab an egg.
To help transfer someone from a chair to a bed or to the toilet.
I prepare the software to support the research that we do.
We were incredibly inefficient on the computing side,
so the biggest change I think that I've helped to make is
to sort of standardize the technologies we use,
so that they're not a barrier.
Android is this underlying platform that you can just do anything with.
It has such an active community of people designing and innovating,
so that we can bring in somebody else's tools to solve a problem,
so that we don't have to learn a new technology each time,
we can just start working.
The type of person that I think has a propensity to join the military,
has a feeling of service and commitment
to something greater than themselves.
That's it.
Okay.
All the way up?
I just have to remember to hit the right button.
You ready? Let me know if you need me to slow down.
Sometimes you get so close to the process itself.
Everything is wires and ones and zeros and
all of a sudden you get to the subject trials.
You have a human being come in and start using your product.
You see the potential for it to change their life
and all of a sudden it's this big wow moment.
I realized service doesn't end when you get out of the military,
it just changes.
They're so tough, my children.
They're so much tougher than I am.
Every now and then, I'll see them solve a problem and I'm like:
"Man, if they can do that, they're going to be just fine."
Those moments come to me and I feel such peace all of a sudden.
Will I ever get to talk to my son?
That's something I think about every day.
Of course I'm hopeful.
And that's part of why I became an engineer,
it's part of why I got into this field,
is that I'm not going to sit around and wait
for somebody else to fix the problem.
There's not a minute to be wasted
thinking about anything, but the good things that we can do.
A lot of us, we live in two worlds.
I love innovation,
but my culture is heavily-rooted in tradition.
There's this constant struggle where
I feel like I'm walking this tightrope
and I'm trying to figure out,
who am I amongst this.