Engineering has an image problem. This researcher is working to bring more young women into the field.
The low visibility of engineering in Australia is a major challenge, says Dr Beena Ahmed, senior lecturer in electrical engineering and telecommunications at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “Engineers don’t sell their profession enough to society,” she told The Brilliant.
This, in part, is why the contributions of engineers to the average Australian’s quality of life are often not recognised. During the pandemic, for example, the part played by healthcare workers has understandably been front of mind, yet the critical behind-the-scenes support of engineers is seldom acknowledged, says Ahmed. “You’ve got engineers developing the instruments and equipment, even the production of the RATs – engineers have a role in all of that.”
Another persistent problem is the low numbers of young women enrolling in engineering degrees. Rates of participation in most STEM degrees have moved closer to parity, but women in engineering remain firmly in the minority at university (around one in six) and in the workforce (around one in eight).
For Ahmed, the problems of visibility and gender parity are linked. She hopes to help turn things around by challenging perceptions of what an engineer looks like, and where an engineering career can take you.
That problem-solving thing
Born in Pakistan, Ahmed had “an international upbringing” divided between England, Nigeria and the US, due to her father’s career as a mathematician.
From an early age, Ahmed shared her father’s enthusiasm for mathematics. She loved astronomy, too, and says her passion for these subjects was borne out of her natural urge to conjure up solutions to complex problems. “That you could come up with a problem, write an equation and come up with a solution,” she says, is what really interested her.
Ahmed and her family returned to Pakistan when she was 14, and she went on to study electrical engineering at the local University of Engineering and Technology Lahore. At the time, in the 1990s, she recalls being one of 10 girls in a cohort of 300.
Ahmed credits her parents – her mother was also an academic, in the languages – for giving her the confidence to seek out the career she wanted, regardless of what was considered the ‘norm’ for girls her age.
“My parents were very passionate about women having equal opportunity, not tied down by the limits that society imposes on women,” says Ahmed. “They were both very encouraging about pursuing a career where I would be independent.”
The need for role models
That nudge towards a particular career by a parent, teacher or mentor can strongly influence student decisions, says Ahmed, who for six years has been mentoring and running engineering outreach programmes at Australian universities to give school girls “a little taste of engineering”.
Ahmed says girls are less likely than boys to receive career advice pointing them in the direction of engineering. That, combined with a dearth of role models and peer pressure to pursue other careers, makes it difficult for girls to take on subjects where they are in the minority. “That becomes a huge jump,” says Ahmed. “Why would you study advanced mathematics? All your friends are in history or biology.”
Ahmed thinks that girls are drawn to careers that are perceived to benefit society. With this in mind, an outreach programme she ran in 2019 as part of the Superstars of STEM initiative showcased engineering as a career in which young women can make the world a better place.
Her own research, for example, is focussed on assisting healthcare professionals in providing the best care for their patients. She develops devices and systems that can collect, identify and interpret large amounts of biological data relevant to human health, such as brain activity, heart rate and speech patterns, which can be used to develop technology-based solutions.
Applications of her work include detecting sleep disorders using minimally invasive sensors and tracking cognitive ability in elderly patients using a smartphone app that analyses speech.
Speech recognition, technology and inclusion
Ahmed is particularly interested in expanding access to automated speech-recognition tools, which are underpinned by machine learning, a technique that allows artificial intelligence models to be trained using an ever-expanding library of voice samples.
“Each time we use Siri or Google, we’re actually giving them our speech, and they store it and then they refine their models,” she says. When Siri made her debut in 2011, she had been trained primarily on American speech samples, and initially struggled to understand the speech of users with non-American accents.
While it’s true that voice recognition has become more accurate and user-friendly over time, says Ahmed, that’s not the case for all users, such as those whose speech is affected by a medical condition such as cerebral palsy.
Children, too, are excluded from access to speech-recognition tools, partly because their speech is more variable than adults’, and a relatively small amount of recorded speech data from children is available to researchers and developers due to the ethical challenges of collecting it.
Ahmed is lead researcher on the AusKidTalk project, which aims to collect speech samples from 750 Australian children aged 3-12. The project has recruited engineers, speech pathologists, linguists and psychologists from UNSW, the University of Sydney, the University of Western Sydney, Macquarie University and the University of Melbourne to construct a research database of typically developing and disordered children’s speech.
In 2021, Ahmed received the Women in AI (Education) Award for her work as co-founder of Say66, a Sydney-based technology start-up that has developed a tablet-based video game called Say Bananas that aims to deliver speech therapy to children with speech sound disorders (SSDs). It’s the culmination of a 12-year collaboration between Ahmed and Professor Kirrie Ballard, a speech-pathology researcher from the University of Sydney.
Research shows that children whose speech is hard to understand (compared to their peers) are at higher risk of being bullied and experiencing difficulties learning to read. In addition, the social, educational and psychological impacts of having an SSD have been shown to carry over into adulthood. That’s why it’s so important to treat the disorder early on.
Therapy for SSDs must be high-intensity in order to make a difference, but it’s not feasible for all patients to attend therapy several times a week. Many kids also find practising repetitive exercises at home boring, and it’s hard for parents to provide effective feedback, which is a crucial therapeutic element.
By gamifying the process, Ahmed and Ballard hope to make a difference. Say Bananas is an adventure game in which speech exercises are interwoven with gameplay. The monkey character controlled by the player must collect a certain number of stars to proceed to the next level, and collecting a star requires the child to complete exercises. AI scans their speech in real-time for errors and provides feedback. Speech pathologists can monitor a child’s progress remotely and tailor their home practice accordingly.
“With Say66 I think the impetus was to actually find a product that children could use,” says Ahmed. “You could actually see your research have benefit to society.”
Article by Kate Arneman