Guest Speaker To Discuss Commercial Side Of UAVs

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Sep 10, 2012, 02:53 ET

HAMPTON, Va., Sept. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A NASA talk here will explore how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) – known primarily for their military applications – have a small but growing civilian side that includes firefighting, police and security work, pipeline surveillance and atmospheric research.

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On Tuesday, Sept. 11, at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., Steven Sliwa will present, "Aeronautical Entrepreneuring with UAVs," at 2 p.m. in the Reid Conference Center. Sliwa is a former NASA Langley employee and former CEO of Insitu, a developer of miniature robotic airplanes or UAVs for military and civilian applications.

Media who wish to interview Sliwa can do so during an availability at 1:15 p.m., and should contact Chris Rink at 757-864-6786, or [email protected] by noon for credentials and entry to NASA Langley.

On Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., Sliwa will present a similar talk for the general public at the Virginia Air & Space Center in downtown Hampton. The evening presentation is free and no reservations are required.

As CEO of Insitu, Sliwa's company developed and operated the ScanEagle and Integrator UAVs that logged over 800,000 hours of flight operations, mostly in support of military operations around the world. He will describe some of the key contributors to his company's success including the technical and business model breakthroughs.

Before Insitu, Sliwa was a research manager at NASA, founder of an educational software company, vice president of product development for a Silicon Valley engineering-software company and president of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He has engineering degrees from Princeton and George Washington and a business degree from Stanford.

For more information about NASA Langley's Colloquium and Sigma Series Lectures, visit:

http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/Lectures/

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SOURCE NASA