A Highly Interactive SXSW
March 31, 2014 — Wolfram Blog Team
If you were one of the 72,000 highly energized people in Austin, Texas, earlier this month for the 2014 SXSW Music, Film, and Interactive Festival, you might have had the opportunity to connect with Stephen Wolfram and the Wolfram team at this year’s event. Known for showcasing cutting-edge technologies and digital creativity, Stephen was invited by the SXSW committee to present a featured talk for the third year in a row.
If you missed Stephen live in Austin—and even if you didn’t—the “speaker’s cut” of his featured talk, “Injecting Computation Everywhere,” was posted to his Blog last week. In it, Stephen presents his vision of a future where there is no distinction between code and data, and showcases the Wolfram Language through examples and demos using Wolfram Programming Cloud, Data Science Platform, and other upcoming Wolfram technologies.
Response to Stephen’s talk was overwhelmingly positive, as attendees were inspired and impressed by the possibilities of the Wolfram technology stack. Business Insider, Popular Science, and VentureBeat were just a few of the media outlets on hand to cover the event. In other favorable receptions: Immediately following his featured talk, a book signing of Stephen’s award-winning work, A New Kind of Science, was so well attended that the SXSW bookstore ran out of copies!
All this activity paved the way for interesting conversations in the Wolfram booth throughout the event, where attendees of every age and level had the opportunity to see the Wolfram Cloud and Wolfram Language in action, talk to Wolfram experts, and get hands-on experience with our technologies, including the Wolfram Language and Mathematica running on the Raspberry Pi.
One of the most popular activities in the Wolfram booth at SXSW was “live-coding” with Stephen and other Wolfram team members. Some neat examples of these spontaneous coding demos—from color-mapping countries of the world by GDP and computing stock values over time, to webcam face detection and pop art creation—can be seen and discussed further in the online Wolfram Community.
And in a unique mashup, Rolling Stone captured the moment when computational genius met musical genius at Slashathon, the first-ever music-focused hackathon. The event was hosted by Slash from Guns N’ Roses, and Wolfram provided mentoring for the competition in the form of onsite coding experts and technology access.
If we missed you at SXSW 2014, perhaps we’ll see you in Austin next year. In the meantime, consider joining us for our European Wolfram Technology Conference in Germany in May. You can also look for Wolfram in Boston in May at Bio-IT World, or in Indianapolis in June at the ASEE Annual Conference. Bookmark our events page for updates on future trade shows and conferences where you can connect with Wolfram!
Injecting Computation Everywhere–A SXSW Update
March 25, 2014 — Stephen Wolfram
Two weeks ago I spoke at SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX. Here’s a slightly edited transcript (it’s the “speaker’s cut”, including some demos I had to abandon during the talk):
Well, I’ve got a lot planned for this hour.
Basically, I want to tell you a story that’s been unfolding for me for about the last 40 years, and that’s just coming to fruition in a really exciting way. And by just coming to fruition, I mean pretty much today. Because I’m planning to show you today a whole lot of technology that’s the result of that 40-year story—that I’ve never shown before, and that I think is going to be pretty important.
I always like to do live demos. But today I’m going to be pretty extreme. Showing you a lot of stuff that’s very very fresh. And I hope at least a decent fraction of it is going to work.
OK, here’s the big theme: taking computation seriously. Really understanding the idea of computation. And then building technology that lets one inject it everywhere—and then seeing what that means.
Bridging Architecture and Engineering with Mathematica
March 4, 2014 — Wolfram Blog Team
As an instructor at the School of Architecture Paris-Malaquais, Maurizio Brocato chooses to use Mathematica because he finds alternative solutions “less complete.” Only Mathematica incorporates the requisite image, logic, and mathematics functionality into one platform.
Brocato teaches his doctoral students the importance of understanding formal and fundamental viewpoints, and his goal is to prepare them to collaborate across disciplines with others in the field of engineering.
Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language
February 24, 2014 — Stephen Wolfram
We’re getting closer to the first official release of the Wolfram Language—so I am starting to demo it more publicly.
Here’s a short video demo I just made. It’s amazing to me how much of this is based on things I hadn’t even thought of just a few months ago. Knowledge-based programming is going to be much bigger than I imagined…
Searching Genomes with Mathematica and HadoopLink
February 21, 2014 — Wolfram Blog Team
Editorial note: This post was written by Paul-Jean Letourneau as a follow-up to his post Mathematica Gets Big Data with HadoopLink.
In my previous blog post I described how to write MapReduce algorithms in Mathematica using the HadoopLink package. Now let’s go a little deeper and write a more serious MapReduce algorithm.
I’ve blogged in the past about some of the cool genomics features in Wolfram|Alpha. You can even search the human genome for DNA sequences you’re interested in. Biologists often need to search for the locations of DNA fragments they find in the lab, in order to know what animal the fragment belongs to, or what chromosome it’s from. Let’s use HadoopLink to build a genome search engine!
Spellbound Valentines: DIY Art from 3D-Printed Sound
February 12, 2014 — Vitaliy Kaurov, Technical Communication & Strategy
An original gift can make people feel much warmer, especially in the icy weather affecting so many places this winter—including our headquarters. Valentine’s Day is a good excuse to get a little creative in the art of gift making. And for me, “getting creative” long ago became synonymous with programing in the Wolfram Language. It is that medium that compels me to treat programming as art, where one can improvise, easily pulling magical rabbits out of a hat.
So what shall we make? I think the best gift is a DIY one—especially if it says a lot without even making a sound. Below you see a 3D-printed silver earring in the shape of a sound wave recorded while a person is saying “I love you.”
Registration Is Open for Mathematica Summer Camp 2014
February 10, 2014 — Crystal Fantry, Manager, Education Content
We are happy to announce the Mathematica Summer Camp 2014! This camp, for advanced high school students entering grades 11 or 12, will be held at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts July 6–18. If you are ready for two weeks of coding fun, apply now on our website. Students who attend the camp have a unique opportunity to work one-on-one with Wolfram mentors in order to build their very own project in Mathematica.
Improving Financial Analysis with Mathematica
February 3, 2014 — Wolfram Blog Team
When it comes to risk analysis, Mathematica is fast and reliable. That’s why Thomas Roux and Rémy Fellous decided to use Mathematica in lieu of technologies like Java and JVBA for conducting risk assessments at BRED Banque Populaire.
Computer-Based Math Continues to Gain Momentum
January 27, 2014 — Wolfram Blog Team
The country of Estonia has been racking up the accolades recently, receiving high praise for its stellar PISA scores, and recognition from the BBC News for its progressive, cutting-edge teaching practices. One of the many reasons for this is that Estonian primary schools have long been teaching students as young as seven and eight years old how to build robots, develop QR codes, and write computer programs. They are the pioneers of a growing movement to finally make computer science once again a core subject in K–12 classrooms. Innovative school districts worldwide, including Chicago Public Schools in the US, have recently begun to follow suit, incorporating computer science into the lesson plans of classes as early as primary school.
How to Win at Rock-Paper-Scissors
January 20, 2014 — Jon McLoone, International Business & Strategic Development
Rock-paper-scissors* isn’t obviously interesting to look at mathematically. The Nash-equilibrium strategy is very simple: choose equally and randomly from the three choices, and (in the long run) your opponent will not beat you (nor will you beat your opponent). Nevertheless, it’s still possible for a computer strategy to beat a human player over a long run of games.
My nine-year-old daughter showed me one solution with a Scratch program that she wrote that won every time by looking at your choice before making its decision! But I will walk you through a simple solution that wins without cheating.
