Furman Drone Team wins again

Furman’s drone team was recently selected by Business Black Box as a winner of its 2015 Innovation Award, one of seven awards made through the annual Business Black Box Awards. The Innovation Award is given to a person or company who has pushed the limits of what is already understood or possible.

“Innovation is all around us, so this award isn’t necessarily for the newest technology,” says Jordana Megonigal, Publisher of Business Black Box. “Rather, we see the innovation as coming from the person or people involved, and the technology is just a way of implementing a new idea. In this case, we are happy to recognize the Furman Drone Team, and Dr. John Conrad as its leader, for their work in the Poe Mill area, using drones to determine a correlation between light sources and crime rates.”

The Business Black Box honor comes on the heels of other recognitions. Last August, Furman’s drone team was awarded Drone Prize 2014, which was sponsored by Arlington, Va.-based Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a non-profit organization devoted to advancing the unmanned systems and robotics community.

Furman’s drone team also received Innovision’s Community Service Award last November for the cooperative project between the Greenville County Sheriff’s Department and other Furman departments in the study of street lighting and crime.

The drone project at Furman started as a collaborative effort among the university’s Department of Physics and students in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class taught by Mike Winiski, Associate Director of Furman’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

All Business Black Box award winners can be seen in the Q1 2015 issue of Business Black Box.

For more information, contact the Furman News and Information Office at (864) 294-3107.

About Business Black Box

Launched in 2008, Business Black Box is Upstate South Carolina’s business magazine and serves its vision to connect, advise, and grow local business. Published quarterly by Showcase Publishing in Greenville, South Carolina, Business Black Box has grown to a circulation of more than 11,000 business owners, reaching a readership of 38,500 business executives per issue. To learn more, visit www.insideblackbox.com.