Monash Ph.D in Assistive Technology

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Speaker 1 00:28

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of New Horizons, I'm Vaughan Bennison, thanks once again for joining us.This week for those of you with an interest in study and an interest in assistive technology, let's bring the two together. We're speaking with Matt Butler from Monash University. Matt, it's great to talk to you, thanks for joining us on the programme.

Speaker 2 00:47

Thank you so much for having me on board. I really appreciate it. 

Speaker 1

Tell us a little bit about you. 

Speaker 2

For sure. So I'm an academic at Monash University. I'm look, I'm part of a faculty of information technology. And I guess why I'm here on the program today is probably around my research area, which so I look at assistive technology and particularly I have a focus on technology to support access to, I guess, what would be typically thought of as visual information to support people who are blind or have low vision. So I look at emerging technologies and that could be things like 3D printing. It could be electronics and sensors. It could be increasingly conversational agents and AI. Reflect on them as my role of a technologist and work with the community to explore how they could support access to information.

So that is mostly around what my research focuses on. And then I have a number of research projects that relate to that and also a number of PhD students who are working in that as well.

Speaker 1 01:45

So what got you interested in access technology or assistive technology? What's your preferred term for it?

Speaker 2 01:51

So, look, we use either assistive technologies, or I'm also in a research group that kind of calls themselves inclusive technologies. So, you know, a debate rages on about whether we should be using one over the other. And look, assistive technology is pretty well probably understood. We went with inclusive technologies because we liked the broader sense of it. And I guess just more around bringing people with different diverse needs kind of into activity and into things. So, we went with inclusive tech. But a little bit about my background. So, I actually have an engineering background. So, I started my career in my life as a computer systems engineer. So, I did electronic and computer engineering.

So, I always have that interest in electronics and computing and things like that. I worked as an engineer for quite a while, you know, looked for career changes as people do at times. I ended up back in the university doing the PhD that I always kind of thought I would do as an undergrad. And my original research area was in around technologies to support students more broadly and kind of computing education. And I was looking at the role of technology to support that. And then it's about 10, 11 years ago now.

I got asked to be part of a research project that was being led by Professor Kim Marriott from my institution where we were looking at how we could better support students who were blind or have low vision in a kind of a higher education setting. And he asked me to be part of it because my work was exploring the role of technologies to support students. And I just kind of fell in love with researching in that area. And for me, the more immediate impact that doing that work had the potential to have.

Speaker 1 03:41

And it's a really exciting area, I guess, of the disability sector, assistive technology broadly. And for those of us, of course, who are blind or vision impaired, assistive technology in the information space. And there's been a lot of changes over the last 40 years, but what has really impressed me, particularly in the last 15 or 20 years, is the significant weight that Monash has put behind looking at creating and developing change for disabled people.
It's really impressed me. Do you know if there is a fundamental reason why? I guess you could say Monash is really leading the way in the country in this area.

Speaker 2 04:23

It's happened fairly organically, I would say. So I talked about that project I was involved in in 2013, and that was with Professor Kim Marriott. And he was already doing a little bit of work in this space and had a PhD student who was doing work around assistive technology and had a really keen interest in it. And then so he and I were working on this and again with this focus on supporting people who are blind or have low vision. And then that led to another project, a linkage project that we were lucky to have a number of really great community-based partners. And that coincided with a couple of other researchers that we had that were doing work around to support people who were deaf and hard of hearing and particularly supporting sign language teaching. 

And so as it turned out, we then, as these projects developed, we started to find we had a little bit of a critical mass, not massive, but enough to kind of go, hey, in our faculty of information technology, maybe we've got something kind of happening here. And then we were very fortunate to have a dean who did see that and was wanting to support that and actually develop a kind of an inclusive technologies research lab. So it was a bit of natural development. What then that coincided with is a little bit of a shift in what our university reflects obviously fairly regularly on what is its focus areas moving forwards. And one of the ones from our recent impact 2030 agenda was around thriving communities.

So then the university kind of reflected on us and it then just grew into what became Monash Assisted Tech and Society Center. So look, it's been, like I said, a combination of naturally evolving, developing expertise and some critical mass, but then also some real foresight, I think, from some of our senior leaders in both of our faculty and our university to kind of get us where we are today.

Speaker 1 06:30

And I think it's so important. One of the complaints I hear regularly is that there's no easy way to learn about all of the different assistive technology. There's no qualifications available in assistive technology. I understand that's changing, and the key reason that we're talking to you today is about some PhD scholarships. [?] ... that?

Speaker 2 06:49

The Monash Assistive Tech and Society Center was set up in 2023, where, as I mentioned, it was kind of identified that we started to have a bit of a critical mass across the whole university that was not just technologists looking at assistive tech, but also people from, say, faculty of arts, faculty of business, engineering, medicine, nursing and health sciences, teachers, rehabilitation, aging, independent living. And so what, again, led by Professor Kim Marriott and also Associate Professor Louisa Willoughby from Monash, really drove the development of this Monash -wide center. And the idea is actually to be a hub for research, but also education and community and impact supporting the disability space, where our center is really trying to advance and leave the development and adoption of assistive tech.

But what is great is having not just technologists, but others, is it's not just about the techie solution. It's actually thinking about, okay, what impacts technology adoption? What are the barriers, the business barriers to the development of these things? So we've developed this quite holistic center across the whole university, which is now around 100 academics strong, which is really great. So what this particular focus of a PhD scholarship is, is to try and support and put out there those that may not have thought about doing a PhD or in this area, try to give them a bit more of an incentive to say, look, hey, there's really amazing work to be done in this space.

And what the scholarship, I guess, is designed to do is to try and incentivize that a little bit. Now, I think what's really important to say here is that the opportunity is open to Australian citizens, New Zealand citizens, people with Australian permanent residency. But we are really strongly encouraging people who identify as having a disability to apply. We are trying to send the message to say, look, we really value people who can bring different lived experiences into PhD program that either have been underrepresented to this point, or may not have thought about undertaking a PhD.

The great thing about being a researcher in this space is there is really juicy research questions to answer, you know, so I put my, again, my human centered computing technologist had on. I like to solve really challenging research problems. But what is great about doing research in this area is they have the potential for very immediate real world impact. And so what the PhD scholarship is trying to do is entice candidates who bring those different experiences, but those different desires to solve really important research questions, but also have meaningful impact on the lives of end users.

Speaker 1 09:52

So what are the prerequisites at this point?

Speaker 2 09:56

Yeah, so it does require that you have some form of research background, ideally. Now, a PhD, what that is probably is something maybe you've done an honors project or maybe a minor master's project or something like that. So something that demonstrates your capacity to undertake research. Now, there is a bit of flexibility in there and it's worth obviously looking at the criteria for doing a PhD in admonish. That's what it requires is some bit of a background to demonstrate your ability to undertake research. And then it's just for this scholarship purpose, we would look at the potential candidates, their suitability, their different areas of interest and then consider each candidate kind of on their own merit.

Speaker 1 10:46

What sort of future does that mean and what will it allow people to do?

Speaker 2 10:51

To be honest, I think if you ask me this question 20 years ago, I might have said, oh, well, you're probably lined up for some kind of academic career. I think things have changed quite a lot over the last decade or two where I think we do find people with PhDs that end up going into other careers that are not just very academic or very research focused. So certainly researchers with this kind of background might go and work for a university and continue research. But equally, they may go to tech companies to help with the research, development, testing, evaluation, design of assistive technologies.

You might go again into other companies where you then your area of research expertise ends up being very important to them to help drive the assistive tech or inclusion within their company. So I think there was a day when you would probably say, well, you're destined for some kind of trying to get some kind of research career in academia, whereas now I think what a research PhD can do, especially this kind of PhD where it is really important that it is grounded in real community need and working with stakeholders doing this kind of PhD would prove your worth in being able to work with key stakeholders in order to develop assistive technology solutions for people. So I think it would open up actually quite a lot of possibilities broadly in that area.

Speaker 1 12:32

And how can people find out more or express interest or even make an application?

Speaker 2 12:37

Yeah, so we have if you you kind of go to jobs at Monash, you'd actually find it did a bit of a search there, you would actually did a search for say PhD scholarship assistive technologies, you would find the information. There is also just probably getting in touch with me. So I'm the main contact at the moment. So my name is Matthew Butler. So I'm Matthew with two T's and Butler with one T's and my email address is Matthew dot Butler at Monash dot edu. It's probably the easiest way if you do drop me an email, then I can certainly get in touch. We could discuss I can send you some more information and those kinds of things. 

But first and foremost, in both my work, the work of the centre is our trying to have strong engagement with the community. We really value participation and co design from the community and the people that we're trying to support through our technology development. So I really value and all my colleagues really value the support that we get from the community and people like yourselves for in supporting us to do the work and we it's really important that we hopefully can maintain that really amazing relationship with everybody and do work that ultimately, we want to have real world impact.

Speaker 1 13:57

And if this is something that interests you, you've got a couple of weeks to apply: matthew.butler @monash.edu is Matt's email address. Matthew  dot Butler at Monash dot EDU. If you'd like to get in touch with Blind Citizens Australia, you can call 1-800-033-660.
1-800-033-660. Or you can email bca@bca.org.au - BCA at bca dot org dot AU. In the meantime, I'll talk to you again next week. 

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