Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
KEVIN LI: One of the great things about being a researcher at AT&T labs is I get to work on real world problems.
And in order to improve people's lives,
you really need to develop empowering devices, change their lives with technology.
And to do that, you need a basic understanding of math and science, and physics and all those things,
just to sort of know what the limitations of the future actually are. One of the problems that we're actually looking at is
So, right now when you're driving, you've got a number of distractors
vying for your attention and cyclists, pedestrians, other cars. The hope is that
we can offload a lot of visual and auditory processing onto your sense of touch. So, we've embedded a
number of vibrator motors into the back of the seat, and these can convey when cars are passing you or in your blind spot.
I realized I wanted to go into engineering research when I was actually at this poster session
at a conference, and I saw all the different kinds of cool technologies that people are working on
with gadgets and new ways of interacting with technology. And it wasn't until that
point until I realized, hey you can actually solve a lot of real-world problems. For me that's when I
realized that this is what I want to do for my career. What makes my job cool is the ability to have
impact on people's day-to-day world. So, what I never really knew growing up
was that education actually buys you a lot of freedom. So, with sort of an advanced degree
comes a lot of credibility. People start believing more or less whatever you say,
and sort of let you work on the things that you think are interesting, because you know what you're actually talking about.
One piece of advice I would give to folks who are thinking about their career is, be curious. You never know
what might actually turn into a career path. So, just take the time to, ou know, get outside of your comfort zone.
You don't have to necessarily go down the same standard path that everybody else is going down.
It may turn out that something you're really excited about can actually turn into a career.
And if you're lucky, you could actually improve people's lives.