Bio

Brady Hunt studies at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where he is majoring in biophysics with a double minor in mathematics and computer science. Brady’s dream is to pursue a PhD degree at a top-tier university before starting a career developing new medical technologies. He has worked as a product development engineer at Nu Skin Enterprises on a cutting-edge biotechnology, the Pharmanex BioPhotonic Scanner. In addition to his practical experience in the industry, Brady has become a passionate researcher in the field of biophysics. Last summer, he completed a study abroad at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Germany, where he investigated flow alignment of protein crystals during serial femtosecond crystallography. This year, Brady was awarded a grant from his university to pursue his own research project, entitled “Investigating the Effect of Ethanol on Vesicle Exocytosis In Vitro.” Studying one of the most basic structures of life, the lipid bilayer, has given Brady an appreciation of Stephen Wolfram’s insight, “The phenomenon of complexity is quite universal—and quite independent of the details of particular systems.” He is looking forward to meeting Stephen Wolfram in person and spending his summer coding in Mathematica.

Project: RFID-Enabled Applications Using the Wolfram Language

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a fast-growing technology that enables automated tracking of any object. Put simply, RFID is like SONAR, but uses radio waves instead of sound. The basic components are:

• Antenna, which broadcasts radio waves
• Tag, which can be adhered to anything, receives radio signals and retransmits its unique identifier
• Reader, which decodes the transmission from the tag

As RFID components continue to improve in performance, their usefulness can be harnessed for a wide range of new applications. However, there are two existing barriers to creating RFID-enabled applications: cost and ease of deployment. In the existing marketplace, deploying an RFID solution costs thousands of dollars to install and maintain, not to mention the cost of building a useful user interface for the data.

The Wolfram Programming Cloud on the Raspberry Pi Linux computer is a powerful combination that has the potential to disrupt this market entirely. The goal of my project is to build a low-cost, end-to-end, RFID solution using this technology stack.

Favorite Outer Totalistic r=1, k=2 2D Cellular Automaton

Rule 500