Meet Joyce Truong: An 18 Year-Old Biometrics Creator

Joyce Truong is a high school student from Toronto passionate about interdisciplinary biomedical sciences and neuroscience engineering related to brain-computer interfaces.

Joyce Truong, An 18 year-old Biometrics Creator. (Picture courtesy of Joyce Truong)

Tell us a little bit about what you do.

I'm a biometrics creator. What biometrics is to me, is the idea of using your biological information such as your fingerprint, your face, your iris, etc. as authentication features. What I started to do in this space is take different biometric systems, such as an iris scanner or a fingerprint scanner and try to combine them into something called multi-biometrics, which is a pretty new field. Essentially, my goal with that is to create a system that is two to three times more secure because you have multiple features to authenticate for.

How did you get into biometrics at such a young age?

I'm part of this program in Toronto called The Knowledge Society (TKS). Their fundamental [idea] is taking thirteen to seventeen year old kids and trying to expose them to different important problems with different solutions. And so, every week, you come and you learn about something cool, like AI, quantum technology, quantum computing, quantum machine learning, brain machine interfaces, nanotechnology, and other different things. But they also teach you about problems such as housing, hunger, global warming, and other large-scale issues that you might not understand at first. They help you create this mindset that by knowing all these technologies and fundamentals about problems in the world, you'd be able to go and solve problems right where you are now.

I started to realize that the difference between a 98 and a 95 is not worth my mental health.

Tell us more about your experience at The Knowledge Society.

For a long time I was pretty stagnant in the program, I did not do much. I was still way too focused on school, more than it was actually beneficial for me. I was way too focused on clubs that didn't create any meaning for me. Then, I saw this change in my life where nothing was really working out for me and I didn't really know what I wanted to do, and I felt like I wasn't doing anything with my time. Because of that, I started to commit to the program more. I started to realize that the difference between a 98 and a 95 is not worth my mental health. I saw that if I, let's say, cut out an hour of my study time and dropped 1% in the next test but I [was] able to learn a little bit about python, build something, write an article about it, and get connections, I was getting real world experience which is a lot more worth it. I continued with that for a little while and I found that it really paid off. It got me to conferences, it got me to meet people! To emphasize how important that was; because of the people I met, I've gotten all the opportunities that I have now.

For example, I reached out to someone I met at e180 [e180’s mission is to create peer-learning opportunities at events and conferences, through face-to-face knowledge-sharing conversations.] because of my work with biometrics and they asked me to write an article about who I was and my experiences with them. Because of something I did on my own time, I was able to get connections and become an intern with them!

Many of us would think it is impossible to be as successful as you are at such a young age. Do you know other innovative teens that are doing similarly amazing things?

Yes! I have this one friend, Sabarish [Gnanamoorthy, sponsored by Microsoft to develop the Microsoft HoloLens] who is one of the youngest AR/VR content creators in the world. He learned AR/VR when he was about 14 and now he's a speaker at many conferences and a youth advocate in STEM.

I also know someone named Tommy [Moffat], who was one of the first people who looked into quantum machine learning, which is the intersection between artificial intelligence and quantum. Really, what this program seeks to do is take the youth and show them you don't need to have all these qualifications to work in these advanced fields.

Well those are all the questions we have, thank you so much for sharing your story with Qube!

No problem, thank you!

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Chaaron Nahar Rahman is a writer and social media content creator for Qube currently studying Science at John Abbott College.