Hi there! My name is Reagan Smith, I am 20 years old, and I do CS. I currently attend Harvey Mudd College (rising junior) where I am double majoring in music and CS.
I'm a huge advocate for young women in STEM, having created and participated in many programs targeted towards middle school girls interested in tech. Look around at some of the projects I've worked on, and feel free to email me at rsmith@g.hmc.edu :)
In April of 2017, I worked with the Merrell Twins and Wayfarer Entertainment to film Project Upgrade.
The goal of Project Upgrade is to inspire young girls to pursue their love of tech. We gathered together 5 "builders," who were college students or dropouts that are pursuing tech. I was one of these builders, and between us, we had a CEO, a cybersecurity expert, a designer, an electrical engineer, and myself, a computer scientist and musician.
Together, we worked with the Merrell twins to create a piece of technology that would encourage confidence in young girls. We decided to build a smart mirror which would have the ability to hold a calendar, youtube videos, the time, the weather, and most importantly, affirmations that cycled across the screen.
I was on the coding team for this endeavor. I contributed to the website that was behind the mirror. I personally built the youtube and calendar embedding. You can check out our code here
The catch is we were on camera. So all of the debugging frustrations, intense design discussions, and the successes were caught on film. Some scenes were staged, but most of the material was true interaction.
My favorite part about Project Upgrade was the people I met. The team brought in mentors from lots of different companies. We met with amazing women from Google, Walt Disney Imagineering, Nasa's JPL, and an advanced shoe startup called Thesis Couture. I left the weekend feeling incredibly inspired and motivated.
It's going to air sometime early fall 2017! I can't wait.
I built this robot on a team of two for a freshman elective. We designed him to play a "capture the flag" like game, wheeling around a small arena and collecting stations. I led the software portion of the build, and my teammate led hardware.
Unfortunately, I can't share my competition code because my school has an honor code, and doesn't appreciate code being brodcasted for classes that are still being taught. However, if you're really curious, shoot me an email about it.
However, I did program the robot to play the "Attack On Titan" on it's 8-bit speaker. You see can see that video here and see the code here.
The algorithm I developed consisted of two parts. Tracking black tape that circled the arena, and constantly flashing our bot's "gold code;" a code that, when recieved by a station, would then be claimed for our team.
Unfortunately, our motors broke 10 minutes before the competition, and we didn't have time to install new ones. Thankfully, we had planned to play the music while claiming stations, even attaching a second arduino (spot the electrical tape) to do this without altering the algorithm. Though our robot couldn't move, it could at least make beautiful music to accompany our loss.
When bacterium replicates itself, it also replicates any plasmids that it contains. We can harness this aspect of reproduction by inserting a plasmid of our own in order to create our own engineered bacterium, which can then report aspects of its environment.
We created a plasmid that would report the concentration of Na+ through color, by producing a red chromoprotein when in the presence of Na+. After tentative success with this bacterium strain, we decided to create a new biomachine.
This newer biomachine would have the same response to nickel. To do this, we researched and ordered a new promotor that responded to nickel. We integrated it into a plasmid that contained a red chromoprotein.
We had less success with the second biomachine than we did in the first. It's likely this is because the promotor we ordered didn't respond successfully to the nickel, probably due to the concentration.
Here we see a gel electrophoresis of our second biomachine. After attached the plasmid all together and inserting into DNA, we used gel electrophoresis to measure the length of the plasmid to ensure everything was successfully attached.
We can see that all attempted colonies but 6 and 8 were processed correctly. The ladder tells us where a strand of a certain length will fall in the gel. The larger the DNA strand, the longer it takes to move through the gel.
We chose to culture colony 1 for our project. We could have chosen any but 6 or 8, because every one of these was the correct length. Yay biology!
I am spending summer 2017 in Redondo Beach, California. I am interning with one of the premiere defense companies in the world.
I am working in the Systems Engineering sector of the company. I spend my time on the AEHF databases team.
AEHF is a satellite communication system. Three of our six slated satellites are launched and functional, and we are in testing on the others. As a part of the database team, I spend my time creating software tools that streamline data analysis.
The impact of a database error can be catastrophic, and can waste one billion dollars. As such, I had to be extremely thorough in writing and testing my code.
Through this internship, I learned how to rapidly learn and adapt to the needs of my team to maximize my value to Northrop during the short time I was an employee
Sadly, I can't share any of my code because it is classified information :( but it was a really fantastic experience.
I'm a huge theme park attendee, especially when it comes to Disney. Along with this, I'm a planner. I love analyzing wait times, maps, and various options to find the most efficient way to spend a day.
However, I get that not everyone is as much of a planner as me. I also understand that sometimes its nice to live in the moment. To bring together these two opposites, I'm working on an app.
The general idea involves efficient planning but in the moment. At the beginning of the day, the user will make a list of their favorite rides, and say if they prefer walking far for a short wait, or waiting for a ride that might be closer.
Then when one is leaving a ride, they will go to the app, which will then take into account the user's current location, the ride lines, and their preferences, and will output a list of 5 possible next activities that maximizes efficiency. I will be using this library to get the data I need.
This will enable people to make smart, efficient decisions, while still be allowed to live in the moment and not be bound to a schedule. Long term, I hope to enable fast pass integration into the app, that will suggest rides to get a fastpass for and have the user end up near their ride when the alloted time arrives.
Slated for MuddHacks 2017, I am working with my friend Alex to create a coffee alarm. He is building the hardware, and I'm building the software.
Like most engineers, I find myself to have a strong passion for coffee. When I am at school, I open my day with a cup and I have a cup after lunch. I want to streamline this process, to allow me to start the day with a little more ease.
So the idea of the automatic coffee make was born. Now, this is a product that can be bought. We are going to recreate it using an Arduino. We are also extending the functionality to automatically add the desired amount of cream and sugar.
However, my favorite part of the machine is the alarm itself. We are going to install a couple of 8-bit speakers on the Arduino, and when the coffee begins brewing, we are going to play a song. This song has yet to be decided (I'm thinking 'Here Comes the Sun')
This will improve groggy mornings. I'd love to wake up to a fresh cup of coffee before a productive day.
