I embarked on my Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical Engineering) at UWA in 1980, continued with a PhD at UWA and remained an academic staff member until 2024 when I decided it was time to retire. Not sure how many alumni are also retiring academic staff at UWA, but this is my story:

Like all engineering students I was good at and loved mathematics and physics in high school. Somehow these interests didn’t seem to align too well with being a doctor or lawyer. Then my maths teacher revealed that engineering was an option. What was that I asked?

Then, as now, UWA engineering needs to keep investing in school career events and marketing, most may know of engineering but not what they do (still true to this day we need more TV series with life stories of engineers rather than medical and crime dramas involving doctors and lawyers).

Thanks to my fascination with all things radio when I read about Electrical Engineering it would mean I would finally learn how radio transmission worked. Back in the 1980s we had all those noisy static AM stations and the almighty 96fm commercial radio FM station, together with UWA’s own 6UWA community radio FM station. The clarity and quality of FM was amazing, and it could do stereo too. How could I not get excited enrolling in Electrical Engineering to learn why? I chose UWA because at the time it was, and still is, the number one university in WA (not that we had much choice then, it was UWA or Murdoch, Curtin University was still “WAITing”)

When you are doing a university degree your final year will define your career, underscored by the final-year Honours project topic that you choose. For me it was digital speech synthesis. That was when I realised signals and systems was my calling card. It was maths; it was magic. To this day the sampling theorem and aliasing still fascinates me, and well, why not? Without it we would still be living in an analogue world. I continued to a PhD delving into the work of human auditory perception and modelling. And when I was offered an academic position in 1988 I wasn’t to know that would be the start of my long journey through teaching, research and leadership, all at UWA.

In my research I met a lot of interesting people, some becoming collaborators and colleagues. My research touched a lot of different areas but always involved signal processing and audio. Even with that diversity, my first research paper was in neural networks and learning the intrinsic dimension of the speech space. It is four if you want to know. My current research during the 30 years since, as I retire, is still in neural networks (reinvented in 2009 as deep learning and recently as AI) and learning the embedding spaces (rather than dimensions) of speech and audio.

Research, discovery, learning and communicating captures nicely the teaching and research nexus that academics revolve around. You engage engineering students in your class through your ability to communicate the key engineering concepts (theory, framework, design, analysis, build and evaluation). And you learn these in the discovery of new ideas and approaches that provide the context and reinforcement of the building block fundamentals.

Before Covid I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Alan Oppenheim, the father of modern digital signal processing who had many awards in both research and teaching. It is appropriate I finish my story with one of his favourite sayings: “The role of a magician is to make simple things appear complicated. The role of a teacher is to make complicated things appear simple.”