Sihyun Chae of northern Virginia is an inventor who heads his virtual company, collaborating with people across the world online.
Last year, fliers started appearing on the campuses of Georgetown, George Mason and American universities. A technology start-up in northern Virginia called Oluha was looking for student collaborators.
For months before that, college professors all over the country - engineers, programmers, medical researchers - had been receiving emails from the chief executive of that start-up, Sihyun Chae. He praised their work, then peppered them with questions about the feasibility of various inventions: a device for diagnosing a car's faults from the sound of its engine, a system that would warn blind people about the edges of subway platforms, a capsule that would enshroud an artificial kidney and prevent rejection.
The CEO received many responses, including one from a University of California professor who volunteered to fly east for a quick visit.
The CEO said that wasn't possible.
"I was afraid that he would find out my real age," said Chae, who was 19 at the time. "I couldn't invite him. But I still shared with him all my ideas."
Chae is now 20. He lives with his parents in Centreville, Virginia, and hopes to become the next Thomas Edison. Last month he released his first product, a free smartwatch app called DriveAlert that monitors variations in heart rate and steering-wheel angle to detect drowsy drivers and awaken them with a loud beep. He created it with a team of people he's never met in person, a half dozen programmers scattered from Brazil to Japan who kick around ideas in a virtual space called GitHub, sharing code and algorithms.
Among them is Joseph Picone, Oluha's chief technology officer and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Temple University in Philadelphia.
"He's a very interesting guy," Picone said of Chae. "Very creative, very entrepreneurial. . . . I think another good thing about the collaboration is he's young and I'm old. I balance some of his enthusiasm with experience."
Chae said his ideas come like popcorn: "Something just pops up," he said.
He has somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 ideas: an anti-bacterial pad that sits by the front door and cleans the paws of pets as they come in from outside; a system that would use forced air to keep rain off a windshield, eliminating the need for wipers; an app that's like Uber for home-cooked food.
"I have an idea every day," he said. None have received patents.
Chae credits his Chantilly, Virginia, high school physics teacher, Christopher Lyndon, with inspiring him.
"He's the one that motivated me to make inventions," he said. "If I'm a success, I'm going to buy a vehicle for him."
Joked Lyndon when we spoke on the phone: "I'd like an airplane."
Chae, he said, "is the most creative person, as far as with ideas, that I've ever run into in my 20 years of teaching."
Still, Lyndon wishes his student had the firmer grounding in basic science that comes from going to college.
Chae always thought he would go to college. After all, it was to provide him with a better education that his parents immigrated to the United States from South Korea when he was in the seventh grade. In South Korea, Chae said, the teachers would beat him when he did poorly on a test.
"That's why I was shocked in the United States, because it's very free," he said. Here, a kid can scour the Internet for information, take free online classes, become a CEO.
When Chae was a ninth-grader, his mother developed bacterial meningitis. She was in a coma for 10 days. Chae, an only child, slept in the hall outside her hospital room.
When his mother awoke from the coma, her kidneys were ravaged and she was blind. Suddenly college didn't seem so important. Chae knew his mother would need his help. He took a four-week training course to learn to administer peritoneal dialysis.
Every night, Chae dons a mask and gloves, sterilizes his work area, gathers bags of dialysis solution, and attaches them to a catheter in his mother's abdomen. During the day he earns money designing websites for small businesses, augmenting the money his father makes repairing shoes.
His mother's disability motivates Chae. When he saw that she couldn't tell where a stairway ended, he thought banisters should have a message in Braille at each end. It was one of his first inventions.
He is excited about his DriveAlert app. In April he presented it to a team at MetLife insurance in Rhode Island, traveling 10 hours by bus to get there. He confesses that he is not a very good driver.
It remains to be seen whether any of Chae's inventions will make him money - or if they would even work.
That doesn't bother Chae, who quotes Edison: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
© 2016 The Washington Post
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
For months before that, college professors all over the country - engineers, programmers, medical researchers - had been receiving emails from the chief executive of that start-up, Sihyun Chae. He praised their work, then peppered them with questions about the feasibility of various inventions: a device for diagnosing a car's faults from the sound of its engine, a system that would warn blind people about the edges of subway platforms, a capsule that would enshroud an artificial kidney and prevent rejection.
The CEO received many responses, including one from a University of California professor who volunteered to fly east for a quick visit.
The CEO said that wasn't possible.
"I was afraid that he would find out my real age," said Chae, who was 19 at the time. "I couldn't invite him. But I still shared with him all my ideas."
Chae is now 20. He lives with his parents in Centreville, Virginia, and hopes to become the next Thomas Edison. Last month he released his first product, a free smartwatch app called DriveAlert that monitors variations in heart rate and steering-wheel angle to detect drowsy drivers and awaken them with a loud beep. He created it with a team of people he's never met in person, a half dozen programmers scattered from Brazil to Japan who kick around ideas in a virtual space called GitHub, sharing code and algorithms.
Among them is Joseph Picone, Oluha's chief technology officer and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Temple University in Philadelphia.
"He's a very interesting guy," Picone said of Chae. "Very creative, very entrepreneurial. . . . I think another good thing about the collaboration is he's young and I'm old. I balance some of his enthusiasm with experience."
Chae said his ideas come like popcorn: "Something just pops up," he said.
He has somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 ideas: an anti-bacterial pad that sits by the front door and cleans the paws of pets as they come in from outside; a system that would use forced air to keep rain off a windshield, eliminating the need for wipers; an app that's like Uber for home-cooked food.
"I have an idea every day," he said. None have received patents.
Chae credits his Chantilly, Virginia, high school physics teacher, Christopher Lyndon, with inspiring him.
"He's the one that motivated me to make inventions," he said. "If I'm a success, I'm going to buy a vehicle for him."
Joked Lyndon when we spoke on the phone: "I'd like an airplane."
Chae, he said, "is the most creative person, as far as with ideas, that I've ever run into in my 20 years of teaching."
Still, Lyndon wishes his student had the firmer grounding in basic science that comes from going to college.
Chae always thought he would go to college. After all, it was to provide him with a better education that his parents immigrated to the United States from South Korea when he was in the seventh grade. In South Korea, Chae said, the teachers would beat him when he did poorly on a test.
"That's why I was shocked in the United States, because it's very free," he said. Here, a kid can scour the Internet for information, take free online classes, become a CEO.
When Chae was a ninth-grader, his mother developed bacterial meningitis. She was in a coma for 10 days. Chae, an only child, slept in the hall outside her hospital room.
When his mother awoke from the coma, her kidneys were ravaged and she was blind. Suddenly college didn't seem so important. Chae knew his mother would need his help. He took a four-week training course to learn to administer peritoneal dialysis.
Every night, Chae dons a mask and gloves, sterilizes his work area, gathers bags of dialysis solution, and attaches them to a catheter in his mother's abdomen. During the day he earns money designing websites for small businesses, augmenting the money his father makes repairing shoes.
His mother's disability motivates Chae. When he saw that she couldn't tell where a stairway ended, he thought banisters should have a message in Braille at each end. It was one of his first inventions.
He is excited about his DriveAlert app. In April he presented it to a team at MetLife insurance in Rhode Island, traveling 10 hours by bus to get there. He confesses that he is not a very good driver.
It remains to be seen whether any of Chae's inventions will make him money - or if they would even work.
That doesn't bother Chae, who quotes Edison: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
© 2016 The Washington Post
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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