“I joke that I made either the stupidest or the smartest decision of my life,” Dianna Liu says laughing, “when I left my refinery job.” Liu is president and founder of ARIX Technologies, Inc., described on the company’s website as an early stage, venture backed robotics and data analytics start-up or, as Liu calls the company’s main attraction, “a pipe-crawling robot.”
“I loved working in the refineries, but I wanted to build something that, if it even helped one person, would be the accomplishment of a dream.”
Before graduating in 2012 with a dual major in mechanical and biomedical engineering from Duke University, Liu interned with a number of…