Being a female in engineering, you know how to have your own voice.
And you know how to stand up for yourself. At the end of the
day, it's about the skill sets that we have and knowledge that
we have. It's not about if I'm female or male.
And I think doing engineering was great for that because it's mostly about
having the problem, solving the problem and I really like that part.
Most of the people who work for Liquid Instruments have come
from my group at the ANU and so we all share a fairly similar background.
One of the things I really like about Nandi is she
was from the outside world. She was an engineer, not a physicist
and that meant that she had a complimentary skill set
that meant we could support our customers a lot better.
It's very rare to find somebody so well-rounded who can do both
the technical sides of the job as well as the human sides of the job.
So, when I first started in ANU, the first few weeks...
Yeah, it was very hard because it's a big change.
I was going to do electronics and uh the first lecture walked into
for digital signal processing, I think I counted
there were only eight girls in the entire lecture theatre and
that was the first time I actually felt a little bit
intimidated I guess. Um and um in my heart I kinda regret that
because that was that was definitely the reason why I
decided not to do electronics and I switched to mechanics and
materials. But to be honest I did enjoy doing mechanics so
I didn't really mind it in the end. I think for any girls that
are considering doing engineering. One thing is to
look at the trend. And I think there are a lot more female
engineers now. Compared to say 10 years ago. And there are
also a lot more female students in engineering. All the teams
in our Canberra office have at least one female engineer, which is really great.
We really wanna employ the best people
no matter their background or wherever they're from,
or whatever their gender. One of the things that
I find is a really effective way of solving technical problems
is to be able to look at these things from different angles
and different perspectives. And if we've all had the same training,
the same upbringing, the same teaching, then we're
probably all gonna approach it from a similar point of view, and we
might be missing out on a real insight that's gonna crack the problem wide open.
A lot of students at ANU are probably already familiar
with Moku:Lab which is our first-generation product.
So, Liquid Instruments makes test and measurement equipment.
It's the type of equipment that scientists and engineers would
use to measure, generate, or process electrical signals.
The test and measurement industry hasn't really changed for many
years. And it has always been that you buy a huge box and it
takes up all your desk space and it's heavy. You need a lot
of time to learn how to use them.
And if you wanna do something else, you buy a different box. What we've
discovered is a way of making the hardware more versatile by
replacing all of the conventional electronic circuit boards
by a very powerful digital signal processing chip.
Essentially, we can tell this FPGA chip to function as
one instrument and then in the next second, we can completely
wipe the chip and put a different instrument onto this hardware.
Our strategy towards solving these problems is to take all
of the complexity from the physical domain, from the
hardware that we need or the optics that we need or the
lasers that we use, and pushing all of that complexity as much
as possible into digital signal processing into the mathematics
and the algorithms because algorithms don't get dirty,
they don't degrade over time, they don't break.
It's almost like coming full circle. We started off at ANU.
So, we're founded by a group of physicists in ANU and
now we've used the technology, we've built all of our products,
a company, and now we're coming back to ANU to do a launch event.
Liquid Instruments is known for our
first product, Moku:Lab and Moku:Lab is the product that we
launched 5 years ago when there were six of us in a sweaty little room
in the ANU, building this product.
And we really didn't know what we're doing. It turns out it's been a great
success we have more than a thousand users in more than
thirty countries and I'm really proud of that. But in the last 5 years
since then, we've been hard at work on our next big thing.
All of that energy, all of that commitment will be released on June 23rd.
June 23rd, we'll bring our next level product, Moku:Pro.
All of our hardware specs are much better
and our software is a lot more powerful. It really is the high end
test and measurement instrument that we're bringing out to showcase
what we can do as a start-up company coming out of ANU.