Crowned with a shock of crazy white hair, American TV scientist Julius Sumner Miller may have inspired a career that brought one of Canberra's most influential technologies to the world.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Dr Alex Zelinsky, co-founder of safety technology firm Seeing Machines, remembers watching the enigmatic professor on television and becoming intrigued about science.
Now chief scientist at the Defence Department and named an officer in the Order of Australia, the entrepreneur and innovator doesn't want his latest achievements to be the last things he's remembered for.
"I hope it doesn't mean I'm at the end," he laughed.
"It's just another chapter, rather than the end of the book."
He took a risk when he co-founded Seeing Machines, spun out of a robotics laboratory at the Australian National University.
Its researchers managed to give computers the ability to know what a person was seeing, and the company became the first in Canberra listed on a foreign stock exchange.
Seeing Machines uses smart cameras and algorithms to track drivers' face, eyes and eyelids to monitor their attention and alertness levels in real-time and provide feedback when needed.
If it detects a driver falling asleep, the seat vibrates and an alarm sounds to wake them up.
The company is now 17, but it was slow going at the start and Dr Zelinsky learnt some early lessons, not least that investors expected returns.
It won customers such as Caterpillar, Boeing and Takata, and its technology is used around the world.All of Dr Zelinsky's successes are a team effort to his mind. He's watched colleagues from jobs he had before Seeing Machines - at ANU, the CSIRO - go onto bigger things too.
"Somehow you feel you've added value to each other," he said.
"I'm a product of all the people I've worked with and dealt with."
He singles out his wife and children as influences, and traces his drive back to his migrant parents.
His father, a post-World War II Russian refugee who came to Australia after working in a German labour camp, arrived in Port Kembla in 1949 and put himself through school and university.
In his new country he met Dr Zelinsky's mother, a refugee who came to Australia in 1958 from China, the daughter of a White Russian who fought the Red Army and escaped to Manchuria.
"They came to Australia and made a life here," Dr Zelinsky said.
"It doesn't matter where you come from, it's who you are and what you can do."
