Houston—The Texas innovation community has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, which has helped spotlight technological and business advances in healthcare, space, aviation, transportation, and other industries.
On October 27 at the Texas Medical Center’s TMCx accelerator in Houston, Xconomy is hosting our first-ever “Disruptors” conference in Texas, a daylong forum featuring some of the most forward-thinking executives, founders, investors, and scientists who are leading this new Texas economy.
Among the topics and people we’ll highlight:
—Innovation in extreme environments such as space and Antarctica, with Scott Parazynski, a former NASA astronaut and chief medical officer for UTMB’s Center for Polar Medical Operations. An avid mountaineer, he is the first astronaut to climb Mt. Everest.
—The new frontier of artificial intelligence. An ecosystem of machine-learning startups is growing in Austin, representing the next wave in Texas’s capital city. We will catch up with Manoj Saxena, formerly of IBM Watson and an AI investor, on the latest trends.
—Sometimes it’s helpful to know where you have been in order to know where you are going. Technology pioneer Bob Metcalfe, the Ethernet inventor, venture capitalist, and now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has that unique perspective.
—Texas is rightly known as a place where cars rule the road. But that expertise also gives entrepreneurs an edge in searching for the next breakthroughs in transportation. Joseph Kopser, who founded Austin-based RideScout, and Nick Kennedy, CEO of Dallas-based Rise, will talk about how their companies are using technology to change how we travel from A to B.
—The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is one of the world’s leading research and care facilities. President Ronald DePinho has led an effort to leverage big data and analytics as a tool to help providers and researchers provide patients tailored care to fight cancer.
—Even startup accelerators can stand to be disrupted. Gabriella Draney Zielke, co-founder of Tech Wildcatters, and Dallas Entrepreneur Center founder Trey Bowles will talk about their efforts in Dallas to rethink the traditional model for how best to nurture not only individual startups, but a region’s innovation ecosystem as a whole.
We hope to see you on Oct. 27 in Houston—you can register for this special event here.
