ECE Florida Shines at Recent Entomology Conference

As part of the recent ESA Entomology 2017 Conference in Denver, ECE PhD student Barukh Rohde helped to organize and moderate a section symposium: “Entomological Engineering: Tracking, Stimulation, and Detection of Insects.”

The symposium brought electrical engineering and entomology together, highlighting how naturally electrical engineering can collaborate with other disciplines. Entomology in particular benefits from devices and sensors that are small in scale while consuming small amounts of power.

Barukh used his engineering skills to devise a method for trapping biologically modified male mosquitos using a low-cost device with low electrical power requirements.

Kan Li, who received his PhD. in electrical engineering from UF in 2015, was also representing ECE, presenting “Automatic insect recognition using optical flight dynamics modeled by finite state machines.”

ECE Florida undergrad Perry Jetter presented low-cost techniques used in detecting the deaths of honey bee queens using tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) chips or magnets.

Entomology Today has more on the symposium, and more information about the conference is available here.