ces-innovation-award
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Alex Westner
Alex Westner is the co-founder and CEO of Xander, a Raleigh-based startup building AR smart glasses that print live captions of in-person conversations directly into the wearer's field of view. An MIT Media Lab-trained audio engineer who spent nearly two decades shipping sound software (including the Emmy-winning iZotope RX, nicknamed the Photoshop for Sound), Westner now turns his obsession with the cocktail party problem into a self-contained, no-cloud, no-phone device that helps people follow conversations they can no longer fully hear.
Yongjoon Choe
Yongjoon Choe is the founder and CEO of lululab, the Seoul-based AI skincare company that spun out of Samsung's C-Lab in 2017. He turned a genome-sequencing detour at Harvard into Lumini, a system that reads ten-plus skin conditions from a single face photo in about ten seconds and recommends products to match. Under Choe, lululab has won CES Innovation Awards four years running and built its diagnostics on a deep-learning model trained on millions of skin-data points.
Satoshi Sugie
Satoshi Sugie is the Co-founder and CEO of WHILL, a San Mateo-based personal mobility company that has reimagined the electric wheelchair as a design-forward consumer product. Drawing on his automotive design background at Nissan, Sugie co-founded WHILL in 2012 with a mission to redefine how people perceive and use mobility devices. Under his leadership, WHILL has grown to 350 employees, expanded to 30+ countries, raised over $153 million in funding, and deployed nearly one million autonomous rides at airports worldwide including Tokyo's Haneda, Rome Fiumicino, and Narita. Named to Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2017 and recognized by TIME Magazine's 50 Best Inventions, Sugie's approach treats mobility not as a medical necessity but as an aspirational lifestyle product.