BLOG > Engineers use Technology to Make Lives Better

I’m an engineer because I believe that engineers have a unique ability to touch the lives of millions of people by developing technologies that shape the human experience. In this recently-released promotional video for my alma mater, Cornell University, I explain why that philosophy is so important to me:


Along these same lines, I believe that not just engineers, but anybody with an expertise in any subject, has a social responsibility to touch as many lives as possible by teaching. We can accelerate world-altering discoveries by enabling the next generation to stand on our shoulders.  I hope you’ll join me in sharing your knowledge with those who have less experience than you, whenever possible.

Last week, I celebrated international Arduino Day by discounting my book, Exploring Arduino. I also asked folks to send in links to cool projects they were working on, so that I could feature them on my blog (especially ones that used some open-source materials shared by me). People send me cool projects all the time, but here are few recent ones that stood out for their creativity:

  • Roman‘s Sign Language Translator
    This is an incredibly impressive project. Roman is in 10th grade and is already building things that have the potential to have a huge impact on the world. I wish I was as awesome as Roman when I was in 10th grade. Roman’s project is inspired, in part, by my Sudoglove project, and his ability to demonstrate it at science fairs around Canada (while winning tons of awards) is reminiscent of the prosthetics research I did way back while I was in high school. Congrats Roman!
  • Bobby‘s custom-made, Arduino-powered, Lego 2D Plotter
    Bobby recently sent me a letter (yes, an actual, paper, letter) to tell me about his Lego 2D plotter project. He even had it write out my name! It’s great to see students using Legos for their own custom purposes. Did you know that some of the first Google hard drive server racks were made out of Legos?
  • Surya and Sharan’s Robotic Head-Tracking Platform
    Surya and Sharan have done a great job of integrating the Arduino into some more complex systems that rely on things like computer vision. In this example, they are using an Arduino to enable a webcam to track and follow a human face.

7 comments

  1. I completely agree with you. Engineers can really change the lifestyle of people. I am proud to be an engineer and I will continue sharing my knowledge to the society as much as I can :) And Jeremy you rock! :)

  2. i think we’ll continue helping each other in order to promote technology as the most efficient way to change people’s lives.

  3. Great post. Engineers advance technology. Technology advances civilization. As long as we keep producing talented engineers, our future will keep advancing.

  4. I am wondering how to graph an output based on a sensor input. For example I would define a max and min for the sensor and a max and min for the output. Then the function would map all of the different possible values in between.

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