Introduction - Blas Rodriguez

Hello everybody, my name is Blas Rodriguez, I am a senior in the BS/MS program pursuing an Electrical Engineering degree with a concentration in automation and controls. I am an international student from Margarita, Venezuela. A small island located on the northeastern coast of Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea.

Margarita Island on the map

               Being born in a small island you would think that I used to spend every weekend going to the beach and just chill on the sand, but actually I used to go to lay on the beach around 2 or 3 times a year. However, I used to spend a lot of time on the sea when I train for triathlons on a beach close to my house. Moving to Philadelphia for college has been a great experience and it helped me with opportunities around the globe. My first co-op was at EwingCole in which I helped to develop several electrical drawings for healthcare facilities, casinos and universities which gave an interest in buildings and electrical power distribution. However, I changed my path and my last co-op was on Sweden in which I worked on signal processing for a high precision 5-axis machining center which also was a great opportunity for me to travel around Scandinavia. In my free time, I am a big fan of culinary arts and travelling, it is great for me to see how the culture and history of a country is expressed on their way of cooking and the ingredients they use. 

Me on my last trip to Colorado

My interest in this intelligent building’s course comes from me trying to find a middle ground between two different paths that I am interested in my career. I am trying to develop automated systems that can facilitate daily human tasks and the human spent most of his lifetime inside buildings. I think the word “Intelligent” is wrongly used to label a lot of systems nowadays because I don’t believe that a light that you can turn on from your phone is an “Intelligent” gadget or maybe a screen that let you choose what temperature you want is not “Intelligent”. One of the things that I learned since I started my controls concentration is that if you need to do something to make a system perform that task, that is not “Intelligent”. I think that an actual intelligent system is the one that is given instructions upon installation and during its lifetime it reacts to the environment and the user to perform the task without the user even noticing.