Marita Cheng

Founder of Robogals, Aipoly, and Aubot; Technology Speaker; Author

Marita Cheng is a top technology keynote speaker, and the founder of global nonprofit Robogals, AI company Aipoly, and robotics company Aubot, impacting over 600,000 people around the world. Marita is an inspirational speaker who has given over 350 speeches since 2012 in 15 countries.  She has won numerous awards including 2019 Member of the Order of Australia, 2018 Forbes World’s Top 50 Women in Tech, 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30, and 2012 Young Australian of the Year.

  • Marita Cheng Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $10,001 - $20,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    California, USA

  • Marita Cheng Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $10,001 - $20,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    California, USA

Suggested Keynote Speaker Programs

Be different — Finding your own leadership

How do you become an innovator and have a world-changing impact?  Marita Cheng, named by Forbes as 2018 World’s Top 50 Women in Tech, succeeded by doing things differently.  She believes her unique worldview came from starting global non-profit organisation Robogals ...

How do you become an innovator and have a world-changing impact?  Marita Cheng, named by Forbes as 2018 World’s Top 50 Women in Tech, succeeded by doing things differently.  She believes her unique worldview came from starting global non-profit organisation Robogals when she was a 19-year-old university student, managing a team of 4000 volunteers.  Robogals teaches girls robotics to get girls interested in engineering, and has taught over 120,000 girls robotics.

Marita tells her inspiring story about her struggles and ultimate success to start Robogals, AI company Aipoly, and robotics company Aubot—becoming a globally recognised technology entrepreneur in the process.  Marita will show audiences how to put yourself into new situations to challenge yourself, work through discomfort, and ultimately achieve outcomes that you didn’t know existed.

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How AI and Robotics are Shaping Society — in our Jobs, Homes, and Communities

AI is changing rapidly and disrupting how we work and interact with each other.  Already many industries have adopted these tools to supercharge their operations.  By integrating human creativity and insight with the processing power of machines, AI will lead to greater ...

AI is changing rapidly and disrupting how we work and interact with each other.  Already many industries have adopted these tools to supercharge their operations.  By integrating human creativity and insight with the processing power of machines, AI will lead to greater technological advances than we could have ever imagined.

In this fast-moving presentation, Marita Cheng will show that these technologies are not things to be feared, but tools to augment humans and our creative expression to find more answers.

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Moderated Fireside chat with Marita Cheng

In this interactive session, the moderator curates a customized experience by selecting topics of Marita’s expertise, providing a tailored and impactful encounter for the audience.  Through anecdotes and facts, attendees gain valuable insights that can be directly applied ...

In this interactive session, the moderator curates a customized experience by selecting topics of Marita’s expertise, providing a tailored and impactful encounter for the audience.  Through anecdotes and facts, attendees gain valuable insights that can be directly applied to their respective industries.

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About Keynote Speaker Marita Cheng

Marita Cheng AM, inducted as the youngest Member of the Order of Australia in 2019, named by Forbes as one of the World’s Top 50 Women In Tech 2018, Forbes 30 Under 30 2016, and 2012 Young Australian of the Year, is a technology entrepreneur and women in technology advocate. Marita Cheng is the founder and CEO of Aubot (formerly called 2Mar Robotics), which makes a telepresence robot, Teleport, for kids with cancer in hospital to attend school, people with a disability to attend work and to monitor and socialize with elderly people.  Teleports have been sold to offices, museums, coworking spaces, for kids with cancer in hospitals and for security.  As well as telepresence robots, Aubot does research and development in robotic arms, virtual reality and autonomous mapping and navigation.

Aubot has been recognized on a global scale through the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2016, and through being called “the coolest girl at CES 2014” by VentureBeat magazine. Marita has presented about Teleport at the M.A.P. International CEO Conference in the Philippines in 2016, MIT Technology Review EmTech Singapore in 2015, and the 2014 World Entrepreneurship Forum in Lyon France.

In 2015, Marita attended Singularity University’s 10-week flagship Graduate Studies Program, held at NASA Ames in Mountain View, funded by a $40,000 scholarship from Google.  While there, she cofounded Aipoly.  Aipoly’s first application recognizes objects in real time on a smartphone using convolutional neural networks and relays them to people who are visually impaired.  Since launching at CES in January 2016, Aipoly is now available in 23 languages and has been downloaded over 500,000 times.

Marita was named the 2012 Young Australian of the Year for demonstrating vision and leadership well beyond her years as the Founder and Executive Director of Robogals Global. Noticing the low number of girls in her engineering classes at the University of Melbourne, Marita rounded up her fellow engineering peers and they went to schools to teach girls robotics, as a way to encourage girls into engineering. While on academic exchange at Imperial College London, Marita expanded the group to London and through innovation and sheer will, Marita then expanded Robogals throughout Australia, the UK, the USA and Japan. The group runs robotics workshops, career talks and various other community activities to introduce young women to engineering.

Robogals has now taught over 120,000 girls from 11 countries our robotics workshops across 32 chapters. Robogals has been internationally recognized though the Global Engineering Deans Council Diversity in Engineering Award (2014), Grace Hopper Celebration’s Anita Borg Change Agent Award (2011), and the International Youth Foundation’s YouthActionNet Fellowship (2011).

Marita regularly presents her work to diverse audiences, including appearing on Q&A on ABC beside two Nobel Laureates and the Chief Scientist of Australia (TV audience 600,000), and alongside Ashton Kutcher at Lenovo’s #TechMyWay (online audience 35,000). As well, she has presented overseas at Foxconn’s H.Spectrum by Yonglin Healthcare Startup Conference in Taiwan (2016), the 37th Kumon Japan Instructors Conference in Japan (2016), the World Engineering Education Forum in Dubai (2014), and the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts’ World Conference in Hong Kong (2014).

Marita was born in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. She grew up in government housing with her brother and single-parent mother, who worked as a hotel room cleaner. She graduated from high school in 2006 in the top 0.2% of the nation, and that year was awarded Cairns Young Citizen of the Year.  Marita speaks English, Cantonese and Japanese.

Marita has a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechatronics) / Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Melbourne.  In her spare time, Marita enjoys reading, traveling and daydreaming.

Testimonials

Marita was the Keynote Speaker at our Global Innovation Day at Iron Mountain. She was insightful, thoughtful and a true inspirational speaker. We enjoyed her Keynote tremendously and highly recommend her as a guest speaker to all organizations that are looking for an innovative and inspirational speaker. She is a tremendous, inspirational leader, an entrepreneur and a rock star engineer who is changing the world. I am honored to have had the opportunity to speak with her.  Every company should spend time learning from Marita!

Kimberly A.

Iron Mountain, a Fortune 1000 company

Marita is a dynamic and charismatic keynote speaker! Wise beyond her years, she conveyed thought-provoking messages on the future of remote work and leading virtual teams at our Stanford CME Live online conference.  What I love most about Marita’s presentation style is her innate ability to really connect with her audience and engage them in conversation.

Stanford

 

We thank you so much for bringing your passion, talent and real-girl appeal to girls and our movement, through your participation on our panel. I know that people will be thinking and talking about the stories you shared, for a long time. You are a role model to so many! Despite the frenetic pace that Convention brings, it was an absolute pleasure getting to know and work with you. Your panel was certainly my convention highlight!

Girl Scouts of the USA

 

Marita took on the role of moderator for the artists to audience discussion after each performance of the Android-Theatre show Sayonara at Arts Centre Melbourne. She was very comfortable on stage and in the spotlight and her delightful personality put both the speakers and the audience members immediately at ease. Her passion and knowledge for the topic of robotics shone through and her skill at steering the conversation and engaging the audience was excellent. She understood the breadth of the work and subtly balanced the discussion to encompass a range of areas incorporating humour and philosophy alongside science and performing arts.

Arts Centre Melbourne

 

You had the audience totally absorbed as you spoke so eloquently about the challenges you have faced and the leadership you have shown in getting so many volunteers to work for Robogals, not only in Australia but also overseas. We had many favourable comments from the various architects, project managers, quantity surveyors, builders and building surveyors who attended on the night, all saying how inspirational they found your story! A number of our engineers have been re-motivated to offer to talk at schools and mentor younger engineers. Thank you very much for your wonderful talk about Robogals and your own journey to becoming the Young Australian of the Year.

Umow Lai

 

Marita is the complete package. As a speaker, she is warm, interesting and engaging. She was able to capture her audience’s attention with her message of overcoming obstacles, living her dream and working hard to achieve her goals. She is an inspiration and demonstrates the potential to grow into an important leadership role in future.

Commonwealth Bank

 

Marita Cheng did an outstanding job! Absolutely loved Marita’s energy, ideas, and drive. Love that she provided real life case studies of her own work and didn’t just say everything always worked. The importance of leadership and team culture drives success. Loved also the 4-quadrant chart she provided. It didn’t feel like we were being spoken at, but having a conversation. Great presentation and motivating.

Project Managers Institute, Washington DC (PMI WDC)

 

All I can say is that Marita was awe-inspiring to all that attended the event. She brings with her a lighthearted vibrant energy that is contagious. She made the audience laugh while at the same time sharing an impactful message of resilience, perseverance, creative thinking, dedication, and ultimately success. Read More

Economic Alliance Snohomish County

 

Media

Article

Dec 20, 2023

Learn How Robotics is Transforming Our Future: Watch Marita Cheng on Bloomberg

Marita Cheng has recently captured the attention of Bloomberg through her innovative work in the field of robotics. As a...

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Article

Jul 11, 2023

Marita Cheng uses Generative AI to Inspire the Next Generation of Girls in STEM

  Have you ever heard of a children’s book memoir using generative artificial intelligence art? Well, Marita Cheng‘s new book...

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Article

Mar 2, 2020

Marita Cheng Inspires a New Generation of Women Engineers

Today, technology keynote speaker Marita Cheng is one of the leading women in robotics and engineering However, Marita’s robotic and...

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