UF’s Malachowsky Hall brings multiple disciplines together through three key spaces.
Named after NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky, the University of Florida’s newly constructed Malachowsky Hall for Data Science & Information Technology in Gainesville, FL, is a seven-story, 263,440-square-foot facility dedicated to the advancement of AI, computing, and data science. Completed just over a year ago, it houses faculty and students from the College of Medicine, College of Pharmacy, Department of Computer Information & Information Science & Engineering, Department of Electrical & Computing Engineering, the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research, the Florida Semiconductor Institute, and the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World.
Swarup Bhunia, director of UF’s Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World, was heavily involved in the development of the IOT Lab. He explained that the facility is used by graduate and undergraduate students to build smart sensors that are applied to internet of things technologies.
One project, led by Bianca Burini, assistant professor in the UF Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences Florida Medical Entomology Lab, is using IOT technology to track mosquito colonies in the interest of relocating them. Burini argued that genetically controlling mosquito populations is critical to reducing vector-borne diseases.
“We are developing a sensor module in the IOT Lab to track mosquitos [through] infrared imaging and recording the sound of their wing beats,” Bhunia explained. “On top of that, we are running a machine learning algorithm to detect how many mosquitos there are, where they are moving, whether they are an adult or an infant, and if they are male or female.” Once AI and sensor technology can track these colonies, researchers can use that data to determine how and where to relocate them.