Southern Polytechnic's participation in Governor Roy Barnes' Yamacraw Mission has resulted in new programs and personnel for the university.

The Yamacraw project, launched last year, is a strategic initiative to make the state of Georgia the global leader in designing high bandwidth communications systems and components. It is expected to dramatically increase the number of high-tech companies and employees in Georgia within the next five years.

Southern Polytechnic's Yamacraw efforts will fall into three areas - education, research and industry/economic development. As part of the mission, Southern Polytechnic will be offering two Yamacraw-related classes next semester (Spring 2000) - a course in programming personal digital assistants (palm-sized computers that keep phone books, to-do lists and schedules) and a class in the design of software for embedded systems.

In addition to the new courses next semester, SPSU will begin offering continuing education classes in conjunction with Georgia Tech, and is exploring plans to offer either an undergraduate degree in software engineering or a software engineering concentration in its existing undergraduate major in computer science. The university has hired Dr. Juan Carlos Guzman, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University, in its computer science department and will be hiring two more faculty members.

Ten students have been hired to assist in Yamacraw research: Reid Lyons, Bhavesh Patel, Georgia Pinkston, Pat Roth, Pranit Shah, Jaime Sierra, Bliss Thevakadadcham, Xiaowei Zheng, and Hong-Guang Zhou. Faculty conducting the research project include Dr. Jorge Diaz-Herrera, head of the computer science department, Venu Dasigi, John Rupf, Ron Schroeder and Guzman.