Katie Miltner,
Centerville City Council voted unanimously at a recent meeting to appoint
as city manager. Davis will serve as the chief administrative officer for the city and responsible for overall operations including municipal activities, the Police Department, Public Works and The Golf Club at Yankee Trace.
Davis brings more than 20 years of public sector finance and government experience to the city. Since 2012, he has served as City Manager in Montgomery, Ohio, where he previously held the assistant city manager and finance director positions.
Davis has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Vermont and a master’s degree in public administration from Wright State University. He is a graduate of the Leading, Educating and Development Program from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
Davis began his professional career as a civilian
Wayne Davis
a business litigation attorney, is joining the Faruki Ireland Cox Rhinehart & Dusing team. Miltner’s practice focuses on business litigation matters, such as breach of contract, employment, antitrust, intellectual property, product liability and class action defense. She was formerly an associate at Faruki from 2005 to 2008.
For the past nine years, Miltner was working for the federal judiciary as the career law clerk to the Honorable Timothy S. Black, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. During her time in this position, she developed a skillset that enables her to handle a wide variety of matters.
Miltner received a bachelor of arts degree in French and political science from Hanover College, where she graduated Cum Laude. She also received a juris doctor degree from Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. She is actively involved in the Ohio Women’s Bar Association and the Cincinnati Bar Association and was recently awarded the Hanover College Distinguished Young Alumni Award.
The Board of Directors for the Dayton Area Chapter of the American Red Cross has appointed as the Chapter’s new executive director. Paul replaces Laura Seyfang, who retired on June 30 after four years in the position.
Paul has spent the last seven years with the Red Cross, holding several different staff positions throughout his tenure, most recently as service to the armed forces director for the 27-county Greater Cincinnati-Dayton Region. That position had oversight and worked extensively with the Red Cross operations at the Dayton VA and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Medical Hospital.
Paul began serving the Red Cross as a volunteer on a Disaster Action Team in northeast Ohio, where he ascended to the position of team leader. He took that experience into a staff role as a disaster program manager, where he coordinated volunteers and partner agencies to prepare for, respond to and recover from disaster.
While working with the Red Cross, Paul was also actively engaged in the Ohio Army National Guard. In 2013, he was called to duty and deployed with the 837th Engineer Company to Qalat, Afghanistan, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. For 321 days he operated
Cory Paul
in one of the most kinetic areas of Southern Afghanistan, completing 188 route clearance patrols covering over 13,000 kilometers—three times the distance from Los Angeles to New York.
Upon his return to the United States, Paul resumed his work with the Red Cross. In November of 2015, he moved to Cincinnati and took over as the regional director of service to the armed forces.
This year, under Paul’s leadership, the Red Cross provided assistance to more than 3,000 members of the military and their families before, during and after deployment through emergency communications, financial assistance and information and referrals. Through his leadership, volunteers visited more than 1,400 veterans, offering them thanks, care and assistance.
Additionally, the Red Cross supported the Cincinnati VA, the Dayton VA and the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Medical Hospital with more than $35,000 of in-kind donations.
David Seyer
has joined the Dayton Rotary Club. He is the executive director for A Special Wish Foundation Dayton and a resident of Kettering.
Xenia resident Terry Rogers
also has joined the Dayton Rotary Club. He is president and CEO of Midwest Security Services.
It’s got six COLUMBUS — wheels, a pop top, nine cameras and an orange flag lit with LEDs. It’s 6D32, and it’s coming to a sidewalk near you.
6D32 is a personal delivery device made by Starship Technologies. It’s more or less a cooler on wheels with some whiz-bang technology tucked beneath a sleek, black-and-white plastic body.
Starship is an Estonian company, founded by the same guys behind Skype, that hopes to bring robotic delivery vehicles capable of transporting food, packages and other goods to cities everywhere.
A small change to Ohio law that was passed with recent budget legislation now allows such robotic delivery vehicles to operate on sidewalks across the state. In doing so, Ohio joins Wisconsin, Idaho, Virginia and Florida.
Starship has been testing its delivery fleet in Washington, D.C., and in parts of Europe.
In Columbus, Starship will be testing and demonstrating its six-wheeled cooler for the next week as it works to plot maps of the heart of the city and the Ohio State University area to use when full autonomous operation begins later this year.
“This is a natural extension of the unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) phenomenon, and has the attention of lots of people,” said Steve DeNunzio, director of the Masters of Business Logistics Engineering program at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. “The goal will be to scale it to the point where it’s profitable.”
It turns out that Columbus is a target market for Starship’s bots, thanks in large part to Ohio State’s presence and relative lack of high-rise buildings. The robots don’t climb stairs, and elevators can be a challenge.
“That’s why we’re here,” said Allan Martinson, chief operating officer of Starship. “Low to mid-rise cities and college campuses, that is our natural habitat.”
The company is also hoping to find partners that want to use its robots, such as delivery services, restaurants and others.
Starship already works with Postmates in the U.S. and is working with Domino’s Pizza in Germany to test the robots. It might have 6D32s carting deliveries around the University District by September, although the rollout could take as long as early 2018, Martinson said.
Starship charges per delivery, with the goal of bringing its cost down to about $1.
“We are not there yet,” Martinson said.
The way this works is that Starship subcontracts a fleet, about 10 robots, to a delivery service and engages some local personnel to handle and maintain the fleet.
Deliveries are about 90 percent autonomous, with the robot using GPS and an array of cameras and other sensors to avoid pedestrians and navigate other obstacles. Remote drivers, watching via internet hookups in Europe or California, take over when the robot must cross a street.
At a brief demonstration, handler Kendall Price piloted the robot with a modified Sony Playstation controller. It can turn and stop on a dime, trundle through rain and even snow, and tackle cold or hot climates.
The small robot, weighing a little more than 30 pounds, can carry 80 to 90 pounds of cargo and has a 1 to 2 mile range.
It has three uses, Martinson said: delivering food from restaurants, small orders from groceries and packages from, say, FedEx or UPS. In more than 40,000 miles of testing with the robots, Starship has ironed out a lot of kinks and finds that most people pay little attention to the robots, he said.
DeNunzio cautioned that any unmanned vehicles, whether flying drones or Starship’s robots, will come under scrutiny by regulators and consumers.
“One obstacle is adoption by consumers,” DeNunzio said. “There’s probably a research study available, but the informal polling of my students in class suggests that many of us are still not ready for service by aerial or ground-based drones, or autonomous vehicles like driverless cars.
“Consumers are concerned about things like safety, retaining control, as well as dealing with an unfamiliar business model.”
Much of the business transaction will appear familiar though. When in use, mobile apps will allow customers to track the robot making its way to them, much as users do with Uber. When the trek is completed, customers receive a notice that the robot has arrived along with a link or code to open it.
The robot service raises a few questions. For example, what happens when some prankster decides to steal one?
The 6D32 has alarms, can take photos and video, is very hard to unlock and is basically a homing beacon for police, Price said. There is also a two-way radio on board to allow operators to talk to people near the bot.
A more important question: How much beer can it carry in its insulated belly?
“Enough,” Price said.