A Smart Programming Language for a Smart Cities Hackathon
May 1, 2015 — Bernat Espigulé-Pons
On Friday, February 20, I had the pleasure of giving a talk to a group of young and smart individuals enlisted to represent Barcelona in the Global Urban Datafest. For this hackathon, the organizers offered one Raspberry Pi platform per team and a variety of sensors to capture physical parameters. Their list of suggested project topics included data acquisition and actuation, monitoring and management, security transport and mobility, the environment, and more. The event lasted three days and was locally organized by Anna Calveras and Josep Paradells with the help of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona’s City Council, iCity Project, Urbiotica, IBM, and Wolfram Research.
European Wolfram Technology Conference Draws Near!
April 30, 2015 — Richard Asher, Public Relations
Come and join us in Frankfurt for the third European Wolfram Technology Conference, Wolfram Research Europe’s action-packed annual showpiece event.
Set for 2–3 June in Germany’s financial capital, the conference is where our latest releases will be showcased. You can also hear from our team of experts, as well as enjoy the opportunity to connect with Wolfram technology users from all over the world. And there’s still time to register for this event at the Radisson Blu Hotel, Frankfurt!
Instant Apps for the Apple Watch with the Wolfram Language
April 28, 2015 — Stephen Wolfram
My goal with the Wolfram Language is to take programming to a new level. And over the past year we’ve been rolling out ways to use and deploy the language in many places—desktop, cloud, mobile, embedded, etc. So what about wearables? And in particular, what about the Apple Watch? A few days ago I decided to explore what could be done. So I cleared my schedule for the day, and started writing code.
My idea was to write code with our standard Wolfram Programming Cloud, but instead of producing a web app or web API, to produce an app for the Apple Watch. And conveniently enough, a preliminary version of our Wolfram Cloud app just became available in the App Store—letting me deploy from the Wolfram Cloud to both mobile devices and the watch.
New Wolfram Technologies Books
April 21, 2015 — Jenna Giuffrida, Content Administrator, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
What do genealogy, linear algebra, and the Raspberry Pi have in common? Not much, but they come together in this diverse and engaging assortment of books by the international community of authors employing Wolfram technologies in their work.
Scientific Bug Hunting in the Cloud: An Unexpected CEO Adventure
April 16, 2015 — Stephen Wolfram
The Wolfram Cloud Needs to Be Perfect
The Wolfram Cloud is coming out of beta soon (yay!), and right now I’m spending much of my time working to make it as good as possible (and, by the way, it’s getting to be really great!). Mostly I concentrate on defining high-level function and strategy. But I like to understand things at every level, and as a CEO, one’s ultimately responsible for everything. And at the beginning of March I found myself diving deep into something I never expected…
Here’s the story. As a serious production system that lots of people will use to do things like run businesses, the Wolfram Cloud should be as fast as possible. Our metrics were saying that typical speeds were good, but subjectively when I used it something felt wrong. Sometimes it was plenty fast, but sometimes it seemed way too slow.
We’ve got excellent software engineers, but months were going by, and things didn’t seem to be changing. Meanwhile, we’d just released the Wolfram Data Drop. So I thought, why don’t I just run some tests myself, maybe collecting data in our nice new Wolfram Data Drop?
A great thing about the Wolfram Language is how friendly it is for busy people: even if you only have time to dash off a few lines of code, you can get real things done. And in this case, I only had to run three lines of code to find a problem.
First, I deployed a web API for a trivial Wolfram Language program to the Wolfram Cloud:
![In[1]:= CloudDeploy[APIFunction[{}, 1 &]]](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2015/04/cloud-bug-hunting-in1.png "In[1]:= CloudDeploy[APIFunction[{}, 1 &]]")
Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook: Last Chance to Analyze Your Friend Network
April 14, 2015 — Alan Joyce, Director, Content Development
Wolfram|Alpha’s Facebook analytics ranks high among our all-time most popular features. By now, millions of people have used Wolfram|Alpha to analyze their own activity and generate detailed analyses of their Facebook friend networks. A few years ago, we took data generously contributed by thousands of “data donors” and used the Wolfram Language’s powerful tools for social network analysis, machine learning, and data visualization to uncover fascinating insights into the demographics and interests of Facebook users.
At the end of this month, however, Facebook will be deprecating the API we relied on to extract much of this information.
New in the Wolfram Language: GrammarRules
April 10, 2015 — Jeremy Michelson, Manager of Data and Semantics Engineering
The Wolfram Language provides tools for programmatic handling of free-form input. For example, Interpreter, which was introduced in Version 10.0, converts snippets of text into computable Wolfram Language expressions. In smart form fields, this functionality can automatically translate input like “forty-two” into a Wolfram Language expression like “42.”
But what does it take to perform more complicated operations or customize responses and actions? For that you need a grammar. The grammar indicates the structure that should be matched and the action that should be taken using information extracted from the match.
A grammar gives you natural language control over your computer so that you can process language snippets to yield functions that perform commands. For example, telling your computer to “open a website” requires mapping snippets like “open” and “a website” to the Open command and the URL of a website.
New in SystemModeler: FMI Import
April 8, 2015
Johan Rhodin, Kernel Developer
Henrik Tidefelt, Software Engineer
An important emerging standard has been rapidly adopted by industry: the Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI). It’s an independent standard allowing model exchange between different tools. We introduced FMI export with Version 4.0 of SystemModeler. Exporting your model as a Functional Mock-up Unit (FMU) serves many purposes. First and foremost, it can be used in other tools and programming languages. It also protects your intellectual property by compiling the model code to a binary, which is useful when exchanging models with customers and collaborators. Now with Version 4.1 of SystemModeler, we are happy to announce that we also support FMI import.
Solar Eclipses from Past to Future, Earth to Jupiter
April 2, 2015 — Vitaliy Kaurov, Technical Communication & Strategy
You may have heard that on March 20 there was a solar eclipse. Depending on where you are geographically, a solar eclipse may or may not be visible. If it is visible, local media make a small hype of the event, telling people how and when to observe the event, what the weather conditions will be, and other relevant details. If the eclipse is not visible in your area, there is a high chance it will draw very little attention. But people on Wolfram Community come from all around the world, and all—novices and experienced users and developers—take part in these conversations. And it is a pleasure to witness how knowledge of the subject and of Wolfram technologies and data from different parts of the world are shared.
Join the Wolfram Student Ambassador Program!
March 31, 2015 — Danielle Rommel, Events Manager
Are you a student and a technology junkie? If so, keep reading! The Wolfram Student Ambassador Program allows exemplary students the opportunity to further their tech career by acting as the face of Wolfram at their universities (plus earn some great swag, opportunities, and prizes).
For this pilot program, we are searching for one representative each from colleges and universities all around North America. We are looking for the top tier of technical talent, the peak of perfection, the coolest of coders. The ideal candidate will have 10—14 hours to dedicate to the program each month. They are already a leader on campus, charismatic and loved by all, and with an undying passion for Wolfram technologies.
