2 6 I N N O VAT O R S W H O A R E T H E F U T U R E T O D AY
ALI AGHA
Texas Instruments
Associate Vice President, Design + Planning and Economics
CEO and Co-founder
NoiseAware
Olypsis Technologies Steven Duong had his first major moment in 2017, when he was one of 10 to win the HyperloopONE Global Challenge—a win that kicked off the movement to connect Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Laredo with hyperloop, which can provide fast, sustainable, on-demand travel cross-state in a matter of minutes. More recently, Duong won a contract to create Dallas’s first-ever climate action plan to help the city meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. Duong’s day job is as an urban planner and designer at AECOM; he is also an adjunct professor at UTA, where he will teach a new course in the spring on designing future cities. “Cities are very often designed around transportation,” he says, “so breakthroughs in that sector have dramatic implications on the future design of our cities and the way we interact with our environment.”
learned about the blockchain-based platform Ethereum. It was love at first sight. “I knew immediately it was what I wanted to dedicate my life to,” says the 26-year-old son of Pakistani immigrants. Agha began buying all the Ether coins (the monetary unit of Ethereum) he could afford for $10 each. “By the time January 2017 comes around, it’s $1,200,” he says. He used the windfall to start a blockchain innovation firm called Olypsis Technologies, which is now the most prominent blockchain services provider in Texas. The company’s clients include IBM and Thomson Reuters, but building custom solutions for large corporations is only part of the business, Agha says. Olypsis is dedicated to creating cutting-edge decentralized technology solutions that will make the world a more fair and equitable place. To that end, in January 2018, the company will release Dawn, a product that facilitates trustless peer-to-peer transfer of data—“a portal to the decentralized web,” Agha says. No one can censor it, and it’s essentially unhackable. “It provides the equivalent of person-to-person interaction while being totally anonymous and trustless,” he says.
TI Fellow and R&D Manager
ANDREW SCHULZ
AECOM
Founder and CEO
A L I AG H A WA N TS TO STA RT A R E VO LU T I O N . I N 2016 , AG H A
XIAOLIN LU
STEVEN DUONG
From her work with the first generations of DSL broadband internet to sensing networks to the IoT to the smart grid, Xiaolin Lu has done it all in her 20-plus years at TI. At Kilby Labs, the semiconductor, system, and technology innovation research and development arm of TI, she is currently “solving problems related to low-power or battery-powered devices and the robustness of wireless communication in harsh industrial and automotive environments.”
CHRISTOPHER BROWN Co-founder and CEO
Modular
NoiseAware began when Andrew Schulz’s co-founder, Dave Krauss, rented his apartment to vacationers. What began as a typical Airbnb rental became a nightmare when guests threw a raging party and Krauss was held responsible for thousands in damages. Schulz responded to his friend’s experience by building the technology behind the NoiseAware platform, which alerts homeowners via mobile app anytime guests are potentially causing a disturbance. Today, more than 350 apartments within a 5-mile radius of downtown Dallas use the technology. “Our key differentiator is that with all the benefits we provide, we don’t record any content, and the end result is a privacy-safe quantification of noise within any property, even outdoors,” Schulz says. Recently, the team developed an outdoor, weatherproof sensor to serve the vacation rental market.
Christopher Brown starts his day at 4 a.m. with meditation. He then moves on to reviewing code, checking financials, and making customer and partner calls for Modular, a technology company building a fully digital bank providing access to traditional checking, savings, lending, and cryptocurrency all in one. Called Zabo, it will launch mid-2019. “We’d like to be that bank you trust that also provides access to things like global currency,” he says.
D A L L A S I N N O V AT E S . C O M
21