By james art 
I spent most of 1993 teaching English in a mountain village in Slovakia. While there, I made connections that still play an important role in my life – with fellow teachers, both American and Slovak, and former students.
Recently, I had time to visit with David Ponewak, one of my former Slovakian students, who has been in Louisiana on numerous business trips. Watching his life over the years since we met when he was 11 years old at a summer camp where I taught in Slovakia was like having a front row seat to a story of growth and resilience.
He grew up in the Slovak village of Liptovský Mikuláš. It was easy to tell that he was incredibly intelligent. After I left Slovakia, he and his parents wrote to me regularly. Three years later, he spent six weeks with my husband and I when we lived in El Paso, Texas.
That summer I introduced him to our home computer.
He took it from there.
When he graduated from high school, he returned to enroll as a freshman studying computer science at the University of Texas at El Paso. He spent some time at our home, including holidays and traveling with us to Mississippi for Christmas. He graduated from college at 20 and entered graduate school.
He won the lottery for a green card and opened a store in Miami Beach.
Ponevac is a person who likes to come up with solutions – and do something about his ideas.
“It’s exciting to come up with new things and try them out,” he told me last week.
What did he come up with? An amazing set of things that started in 2008 shortly after the iPhone.
“What was everyone doing then? Apps were the hottest thing. So I created an app for radio amateurs. I had no intention of making a profit. I just liked that thing,” he said. “I said, ‘Let’s see if I can put a ham radio in the phone.’ That thing took off like crazy.”
Tens of thousands of people around the world have downloaded the app. He’s never experienced that kind of demand since, but it showed him that “there’s more to life than sitting in an office and filling out Excel sheets or whatever the 9-to-5 trajectory usually is.”
He began to gather clients all over the world. By 2016, he was interested in AI and something called computer vision, which teaches computers to see, understand and interpret visual data.
Using the models he built, he realized that the AI results far exceeded expectations. Things took off from there.
“Back then, nobody really trusted AI, but when I compared the accuracy of what AI was producing to how we did it the old way, it was night and day,” he said.
He’s invented a number of things — including a first-of-its-kind system that uses cameras, programming and computer analytics to check rail safety, which brought him to Louisiana.
“You’re basically looking at a moving train and analyzing it on the fly – and trying to find defects in real time,” he explained. “The whole idea was to prevent a derailment.
We talked about the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — and the long, expensive and difficult cleanup.
“If you can prevent one derailment, you can prevent a catastrophe on a massive, massive scale. So that was a good motivator to do this work.”
He doesn’t reserve his intelligence for the industry.
David Ponewak with the coffee made from real gold and the craft gin he created for fun.
After his father died, he worried about his mother alone at home in Slovakia. So he invented a contraption that looks like a smoke detector on the ceiling of a room. It can check a person’s vital signs — including temperature, heart rate, breathing rate, and more. It doesn’t use a camera per se, so there’s no visual intervention. It is not yet on the market, and he emphasized that it is not a medical device, but is being tested in nursing homes across Canada.
Then there’s the time, for fun, he created an artisanal gin – and coffee that included real gold, which led to the head butler of the Abu Dhabi palace buying all his stock.
“It was just something different from technology — because you get tired of technology, let me tell you,” he said.
His stories go on and on – and each one fills my heart with an indescribable kind of awe. Watching children grow into adulthood and then do amazing things evokes a mixture of wonder and humility.