Hou got his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China in 2011. After that, he obtained a master's degree from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In 2015, he went to the University of Sydney to pursue a PhD and continued to work there as a postdoctoral researcher.

In October, Hou's wife gave birth to a little boy in Sydney. However, Hou's parents live in China, and precautionary measures against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic made visiting their grandson in person practically impossible.

"Due to worldwide travel bans and closed borders, my parents in China have never had the opportunity to cuddle or hold their only grandchild, which has been difficult for all of us," Hou says.

"Although our family communicates via video call and we update my parents regularly with photos of our son, what they want more than anything is to pinch his chubby arms and lull him to sleep."

That is why Hou is dedicated to the research of a viable tactile internet that could also have more promising applications, such as helping consumers feel a fabric when online shopping, conducting emergency repairs in automated factories, diagnosing a medical condition of a remote patient or even working on spacecraft and orbiting infrastructure from right here on Earth, he says.