Portrait photo

Hey I’m Lucas.

I’m an engineer, researcher and product designer.

If you found this page interesting, let’s chat.

I’ve been working on a broad range of projects from robotics and AI to design tools. Here’s a few of them:

Spectra
Stop describing UI, just show it with embedded design tools directly in your browser.
Completing my honours on deep reinforcement learning for robotics at UNSW under Prof. W. Midgley.
Capturing and classifying motion data at an unprecedented scale - creating a new way to capture the moment.
Designing scalable trust infrastructure for deepfakes featured on PwC , Accounting Times and UNSW BusinessThink.
Bringing dusty photos to life with vision language models.
Crowdsourcing real-time human location data.
Grassroots activism for displaced mining communities.

Some other stuff I’ve been up to:

Musings

My core philosophy

Scale, abstraction and curiosity are the essential primitives for understanding anything.

Abstraction is the framework that allows us to zoom in and out of different scales.

Quarks and leptons, when combined, form the atomic scaffolding of organic matter. Organic molecules, when combined, form the cellular scaffolding for bacteria, plants, animals, and ultimately, conscious systems capable of reflecting on the structure that made them.

Groking large scales down to the primitives requires traversal through long and dense abstraction chains - something only possible with relentless curiosity.

How problems are easier than what problems

“What are we going to build?” versus “How are we going to build it?”

This might read as a misnomer since it’s difficult to arrive at how without deciding on something to work on - the what.

The ideal problem is one where the how is more difficult to solve for than the what. Ruling out the edge cases where both are either trivial or intractable.

How problems are those where the what is easy to understand. For example, cryosleep chambers, anti-matter propulsion engines and nuclear fusion. Their impact on society is non-trivial but how do we do it?

Contrast this with the quintessential what problem: Blockchain. The how has been well understood for years now, distributed consensus, cryptographic verification, programmable ledges. But what should this actually be used for, where it’s better than conventional systems?

What happened to wonder?

Where did the large marble columns and painted ceilings go? Where can we seek modern grandeur?

Greco-futurism is an inspiring style. It invokes awe.

Brutalism, despite its melancholic undertone, still invokes permanence. A durable structure that will outlast you, no matter your opinion towards it.

Today’s buildings, don’t look like they stand a chance against Godzilla.

Publications

  • Barbosa, L., Kirshner, S., Kopel, R., Lim, E.T.K. & Pagram, T., 2025. A New Incentive Model For Content Trust. arXiv:2507.09972 [Link]
  • Barbosa, L., Kirshner, S., Kopel, R., Lim, E.T.K. & Pagram, T., 2025. Toward trustworthy content: the role of challengers, juries and veracity bonds in digital media platforms. Industrial Management & Data Systems [Link]

Course Work

Introduction

MATH1141 Higher Mathematics 1A

MATH1241 Higher Mathematics 1B

PHYS1131 Higher Physics 1A


COMP1521 Computer Systems Fundamentals

ELEC1111 Electrical Circuit Fundamentals

COMP2121 Microprocessors and Interfacing


ELEC2141 Digital Circuit Design

MATH2089 Numerical Methods & Statistics

COMP2521 Data Structures and Algorithms

A taste of maths

ENGG1300 Engineering Mechanics

MATH1081 Discrete Mathematics

MATH2018 Engineering Mathematics 2D


MTRN2500 Computing for Mechatronic Engineers

COMP1531 Software Engineering Fundamentals

ENGG2400 Mechanics of Solids


MMAN3200 Linear Systems and Control

MMAN2300 Engineering Mechanics 2

COMP3331 Computer Networks and Applications

Applied techniques

COMP3431 Robotic Software Architecture

MTRN3500 Computing Applications in Mechatronic Systems

MTRN3020 Modelling and Control of Mechatronic Systems


MTRN4110 Robot Design

MTRN4230 Robotics

COMP2511 O-O Design & Programming


MMAN1130 Design and Manufacturing

ECON1101 Microeconomics 1

COMP3411 Artificial Intelligence

Specialisation

COMP3121 Algorithms & Programming Tech

COMP3311 Database Systems

COMP6841 Extended Security Engineering


PHYS1160 Introduction to Astronomy

COMP3231 Advanced Operating Systems

MTRN4010 Advanced Autonomous Systems


COMP3900 Computer Science Project

MMAN4951 Research Thesis A, B and C