SPSU ends Polytechnic Summit

The fourth annual, three-day, Polytechnic Summit ended at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Ga. today which brought together students and professors from 18 polytechnic colleges and universities across the United States and beyond - Bahrain, Germany, Mexico and China – to report on innovations and advancements in technology and polytechnic education.

As part of the conference, recent projects at SPSU were presented, including a new robotic arm, a rubble house humanitarian project for Haiti, and an oil-well cap solution.

Featured speakers included George L. Mehaffy, vice president for Academic Leadership and Change at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, and Nick Gillian, a post-doctoral fellow and Fulbright scholar working with the Responsive Environments group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. Mehaffy gave a lecture entitled “The Changing Context for Higher Education,” while Gillian discussed his research on the design and development of algorithms and tools that can be used for real-time gesture recognition for musician-computer interaction.

Reflecting the conference’s tie-ins with industry, representatives in attendance came from five companies and agencies: Micro-Simulation Technology; Festo Corporation, Mexico; Festo Didactic gmbH, Germany; Parsons Water & Infrastructure; and the Northwest Wisconsin Manufacturing Outreach Center.

To learn more about the conference, go to: http://www.polytechnicsummit.org/