MENLO PARK, Calif., May 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Global talent solutions and business consulting firm Robert Half (NYSE: RHI) has been named the winner of two Stevies in the 23rd Annual American Business Awards. The company was honored for Best Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Solution and Technology Executive of the Year.

Robert Half received Best Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning for its AI Recommended Clients (ARC) tool—an advanced solution that leverages AI to help talent solutions professionals identify and engage the right clients at the right time. James Johnson, executive vice president and chief technology officer, was also named among the Technology Executives of the Year for his leadership in advancing the company’s innovation strategy, including the development of ARC.

“This recognition highlights our commitment to innovation and delivering world-class technology solutions that drive business growth,” said M. Keith Waddell, president and chief executive officer of Robert Half. “We’re proud of James Johnson and his team for their critical contributions to these achievements.”

The American Business Awards is the premier business awards program in the United States. More than 3,600 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted for consideration in a wide range of categories.

Robert Half has also been named one of Fortune’s 2025 America’s Most Innovative Companies and a winner of the 2025 CIO 100 Award.

About Robert Half
Robert Half (NYSE: RHI) is the world’s first and largest specialized talent solutions and business consulting firm, connecting highly skilled job seekers with rewarding opportunities at great companies. We offer contract talent and permanent placement solutions in the fields of finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, and administrative and customer support, and we also provide executive search services. Robert Half is the parent company of Protiviti®, a global consulting firm that delivers internal audit, risk, business and technology consulting solutions. In the past 12 months, Robert Half, including Protiviti, has been named one of the Fortune® Most Admired Companies™ and 100 Best Companies to Work For. Explore talent solutions, research and insights at roberthalf.com. 

About the Stevie Awards 
Stevie Awards are conferred in nine programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, the Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards®, The International Business Awards®, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, and the new Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries annually from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at https://stevieawards.com.

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SOURCE Robert Half

MOJAVE, Calif., May 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Stratolaunch is pleased to announce the successful completion of its second hypersonic flight and recovery with the Talon-A2 (TA-2) fully autonomous vehicle in March 2025. We are also pleased to share that this significant accomplishment followed the successful first hypersonic flight of Talon-A2 in December 2024 confirming the demonstrated reusability of the vehicle. The vehicle surpassed Mach 5 during its trajectory for the second time, exceeding the previous speed record set with the December flight.

“With the data collected from this second flight, we are able to apply lessons learned to enhance the strength and performance of the Talon-A vehicles. While the team needs to complete its data review of flight two, the first flight review confirmed the robustness of the Talon-A design while demonstrating the ability to meet the full range of performance capabilities desired by our customers. We’ve now demonstrated hypersonic speed, added the complexity of a full runway landing with prompt payload recovery, and proven reusability. Both flights were great achievements for our country, our company, and our partners,” said Dr. Zachary Krevor, President and CEO of Stratolaunch. 

Supporting the United States’ defense initiatives, Stratolaunch is focused on expanding its hypersonic flight testing and ensuring the long-term sustainability of reusable hypersonic testbeds. These completed flights demonstrate the United States’ return to reusable hypersonic flight test since the X-15 program ended in 1968.

“I am in awe of what this team has achieved. We’ve executed four incredible Talon-A flights, completed twenty-four Roc flights to date, flew two new supersonic and hypersonic airplanes in a single year, and we are firmly on the path to making hypersonic flight test services a reality,” Krevor said.

Stratolaunch performed the flights for the Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) program under a partnership with Leidos. The MACH-TB program is intended to increase the speed of testing for all commercially available hypersonic systems. This was the second Stratolaunch flight completed on behalf of the program.

“These flights were a huge success for our program and for the nation. The data collected from the experiments flown on the initial Talon-A flight has now been analyzed and the results are extremely positive. The opportunity for technology testing at a high rate is highly valuable as we push the pace of hypersonic testing. The MACH-TB program is pleased with the multiple flight successes while looking forward to future flight tests with Stratolaunch,” said Scott Wilson, Program Manager of MACH-TB.

“Demonstrating the reuse of fully recoverable hypersonic test vehicles is an important milestone for MACH-TB,” stated George Rumford, Director of the Department of Defense Test Resource Management Center. “Lessons learned from this test campaign will help us reduce vehicle turnaround time from months down to weeks.”

About Stratolaunch

Stratolaunch’s mission is to advance high-speed technology through innovative design, manufacturing, and operation of world-class aerospace vehicles. For the latest news and information, visit www.stratolaunch.com and follow us on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

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SOURCE Stratolaunch

NORMAN, Okla., May 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — On the day of the 2023 Rolling Fork tornado, researchers with the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High Impact Weather (CIWRO) and NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, headquartered on the University of Oklahoma campus, piloted a small network of drones through increasingly hostile conditions. The nimble airborne devices collected data about the changing atmosphere and demonstrated that such a tool could be used to improve the prediction of violent tornadoes. These drones are part of a lineage of uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) developed at CIWRO that are changing the face of weather observations.

Tony Segales, Ph.D., has led the system’s development since he began his doctoral work at OU in the fall 2017. The CopterSonde-3D, the culmination of his dissertation, is a patented design for a weather-sensing UAS that is now exclusively licensed with InterMet, the world’s leading supplier of atmospheric sensors. The patent, awarded last year, is specifically for the front scoop design of the CopterSonde-3D, a weather sensor package equipped with temperature and humidity sensors arranged in a strategic way to avoid data contamination by sources of heat around the drone.

“We designed the CopterSonde to essentially be a weathervane: It points into the wind. That’s the baseline feature from which all the other onboard weather-targeted features were designed,” said Segales.

As the drone points into the wind, air flows through the intake and across the sensors. It’s a tricky configuration to target the right performance window, and even trickier to continue building upon.

“Initially, we had an airframe design that was more symmetrical and easier to balance, but now we are betting on a more intricate drone design,” said Segales. “When you change something, it changes the balance in flight characteristics. Overall, we are achieving a drone design shaped by weather and tailored to atmospheric studies.”

Next-Generation Technology

Segales and his graduate students manage the CopterSonde’s engineering, and Segales is the only UAS research engineer on the team.

The CopterSonde is one example of the research-to-industry pipeline created at the intersection of academia and government research at the cooperative institute. Segales’s designs are immediately put to work in the field, where meteorologists like Tyler Bell, Ph.D., a co-inventor on the patent, test new designs while also collecting weather data for their own meteorological research.

During the design process, the CopterSonde-3D underwent over 1,700 flights in various environments, such as extreme storm conditions in the southeastern United States, high altitudes in Colorado and the salty air of coastal Houston, Texas. Those flights, conducted by CIWRO’s researchers and OU students, gave the meteorologists data to study the lower atmosphere and Segales the feedback from meteorologists he needed to return to his lab and redesign components of the UAS.

The CopterSonde-3D is a next-generation observational platform. The team hopes it can supplement existing measurements of the atmosphere and fill gaps that have been known for over a decade.

“Typically, we get weather balloon launches by the National Weather Service twice a day,” said Bell. “But the rate at which the lowest part of the atmosphere changes is much higher than those twice-a-day launches, and we don’t get much information in between. That lowest one or two miles of the atmosphere is where we live, and it’s the part that influences a lot of high-impact weather.”

The primary purpose of the CopterSondes is to fill existing time and geographical data gaps, but it also opens the door to significant research questions previously unexplored. Because UAS pilots can position the drone exactly where they want data from the lower atmosphere, the drones can venture into scenarios otherwise dangerous or impossible for humans to approach such as wildfires and severe storms.

Bell says the future development of the program will enable CopterSondes to fly autonomously and be placed at Mesonet stations across the country, creating a 3D Mesonet system.

“The UAS would work in combination with other sensors. A forecaster could select an area where they wanted more observations, and the drones would collect that data the forecaster needs in the moment,” said Bell. He believes the CIWRO team will have a prototype developed for testing within a few years.

Game-Changing Collaborations

In collaboration with NSSL, the team is currently working to design a drone that can operate in the type of extreme environments forecasters might want to sample.

“On the engineering side of things, this represents a big challenge. The drone would have to max out during every flight, which puts more stress on the electronics,” said Segales. “We want to measure the limits of the performance of these drones on extreme events to see how much we can really push the systems for sustained amounts of time.”

These collaborations between engineers and meteorologists, cooperative institute researchers and government scientists, create an environment where a product like the CopterSonde can blossom from an idea into a device that can provide life-saving benefits for the American public.

“There is this great feedback loop that we have here, where we can do this research from the ground up, from basic design to the actual application of science and innovation,” said Bell.

An example comes from what Bell calls one of the more impactful datasets they’ve captured: a central Oklahoma winter weather precipitation event in 2019. The CopterSonde-3D showed that the precipitation was changing by the minute, alternating among sleet, ice, rain, and freezing rain.

“That’s an example of how we can improve forecasts using this data, because in those conditions half a degree matters, and the Copter can get that half a degree really, really well,” said Bell.

In the future, Segales envisions a fleet of CopterSondes, each specifically designed for specific extreme events – drones built to handle icing on blades, and others made to soar through high winds and examine hurricanes from within. For now, there’s a patent pending for another member of the CopterSonde family, and the potential for next-generation weather and safety through these important academic and federal partnerships.

About the University of Oklahoma 
Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. As the state’s flagship university, OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. For more information about the university, visit www.ou.edu.

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SOURCE University of Oklahoma