Science and Technology Communication
Back in my academic days I ended up in a very interesting role as a science communicator. I was even lovingly called the Galaxy Love Dr after my biggest foray into public speaking with my 3 minute explanation of my PhD thesis. The journey I went on from there to giving talks all over Canberra and out at Star Fest on different aspects of Astronomy really showed how much EVERYONE wants to learn these cool things but how often it's not talked about in a language a non-expert can understand.
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What I have continued to find, after changing my career to working as a Data Scientist in Industry, is that this gap in communication is everywhere! When speaking with clients about solving their technical problems it's not often that the problem would come from technical people and thus there is often this translation that sometimes doesn't quite work.
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I continue to work with my colleagues to best express what we are building, and how it works, and the metrics we use in a straight forward manner so that anyone could understand what we've done, without the need for being technical. But I'd love to bring these types of explanations to the public, to ensure we don't end up in a SkyNet or VIKI situation in the future.
With the increase in popularity of LLMs I've also started to how the media portrays things like Chat-GPT as Artificial Intelligence, which would be better named as Average Intelligence. I am hoping to see and maybe even participate or help bringing a better understanding of HOW these so called AI and really any technology actually work to everyone.... Before it's too late!
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[Photo credit: Stuart Hay]
Merging Galaxies: Love Stories Written in the Sky
This is where it all started; The ANU 3 minute thesis competition. From a 3 minute presentation I learnt more about public speaking than I had from the many disastrous talks I had given before, including that it wasn't so scary after all. I am lucky enough to have been recorded giving my ANU final talk. Please check it out. Why not have a look at some of the other contestants from each year as well? You may be pleasantly surprised by what you learn!
STARFEST 2014 - When Galaxies Collide
At the 2014 StarFest I was recorded giving a talk about, you guessed it, Merging Galaxies! Why not check it out? There are also talks form Brian Schmidt, and Dan Bayliss, among others for even more Astronomy talks!
ABC radio podcast of 3MT presentation - The Science Show with Robyn Williams
As a final part of my 3MT journey I was asked to come on Robyn Williams' The Science Show on ABC 666 radio. It was definitely interesting and I am so glad I got the chance to meet with Robyn and talk on radio. [Image credit: NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas; and A. Mellinger]