Earl McKinney at the U.S. Air Force Academy during his recent faculty improvement leave
MCKINNEY’S PASSION FOR FLYING LANDS AIR FORCE TECHNOLOGY IN BGSU BUSINESS CLASSROOMS
Dr. Earl McKinney took his faculty improvement leave (FIL) to new heights. McKinney, interim chair of BGSU’s Department of Accounting and Management of Information Systems (MIS), spent last year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at his alma mater, the U.S. Air Force Academy. A former aircraft commander and instructor pilot in the military, McKinney used the opportunity to study how the Air Force uses drones and semi-autonomous robots and how it uses Big Data to make decisions and enhance coordination efforts.
At the Air Force Academy, McKinney taught MIS classes and a class that combined elements of organizational behavior and organizational theory to juniors and seniors. “Other activities included helping to initiate a plan to create a new MIS major, focusing attention on how to improve the management of the school’s network and infrastructure and mentoring junior faculty. I also had the chance to begin research projects on Big Data with academy faculty,” he said.
What McKinney hopes to bring back to the BGSU classroom is the application of drones and semi-autonomous robots to more common business applications “to see how robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming the workplace.”
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