Auburn/USDA Internship in EPG Visualizations and Analysis: AI, ML, and UI

Central to the US Department of Agriculture's mission is a deeper, fundamental understanding of agricultural and
livestock pest arthropods, such as aphids and ticks, how they cause damage, and the pathogens they carry.
The electropenetrograph (EPG) is a crucial tool for understanding transmission of arthropod-borne
pathogens. The EPG enables the collection and study of arthropod behavior as they attach, feed, and
detach from livestock and plants. As such, it has been central to tracking and mitigating the dangers that
arthropods such as ticks and aphids can - and do - pose to the agricultural output of the US and the
world.

In the 2024-25 academic year, one engineering and one CS clinic team undertook a complete redesign and prototyping and EPG's hardware and software. This project will start from that software effort and further pursue the Auburn/USDA team's ambitions, building on top of its data-collection-and-display foundation.   Those ambitions include (1) additional visualization and time-series manipulation of EPG signals, (2) application of a suite of traditional post-processing algorithms to the signals for analysis and modeling, and (3) development of novel, EPG-specific workflows leveraging current promising practices in AI-and-ML for time-series analysis. 

An especially important facet of this project is software quality. The team will first build from the codebase created by the '24-'25 clinic; they will add features -- and organization for supporting more; and they will hand off the system for future development. In addition, this project offers a possible entrepreneurial angle: the hardware and software being developed by Auburn University, the NSF, and the USDA are intended to coalesce into a self-sustaining business of value to agricultural laboratories, departments, and researchers worldwide.