“The journey is the reward,” stated Roger Germundsson, Wolfram Research Director of R&D, while handing out certificates of completion for the Advanced Mathematica Summer School 2009 (AMSS). That was the motto of this year’s Summer School, which ended June 19. The two-week journey emphasized hard work, vast amounts of learning, and great accomplishments from one-on-one interactions with top Wolfram Research developers.

The idea behind AMSS originated from a simple yet extremely powerful concept: in our users’ success lies our success. The selected users at the Summer School immerse themselves in Mathematica for two weeks, working alongside Wolfram staff who have tremendous experience with cutting-edge technology. Throughout the Summer School, the Wolfram developers and leaders guide the students through their projects, helping them understand important concepts and sharing knowledge and wisdom collected over years spent developing Mathematica.

We received over 100 applications this year, with people using Mathematica in many ways that surprised us. The students we selected worked on some very cool projects that came out with fantastic results. Projects ranged vastly in their scope and breadth—exactly what we hoped to achieve with the Summer School! We plan to update our AMSS website with information on these projects in the near future, but in the meantime, here are a few of the students’ topics:

• Quorum Sensing—Cell to Cell Communication (an Agent-Based Stochastic Implementation Built on Membrane Computing Formalism in Mathematica)
• Modeling Institutional Multigames (Identifying the Source of Trans-scale Social Processes)
• Modeling Firefighter Search Using Mathematica
• Using Mathematica for Creating Interactive Applications for Estimating Groundwater Recharge and Discharge Rates and Spatial Patterns
• Laser Design and Modeling Tools with Mathematica
• Flight Operational Safety Analysis—Independent, Closely Spaced Parallel Runway Approaches
• Modeling Arterial Heart Pressure

It was exciting to see not only sophisticated user-interfaces and results coming out of the projects, but the enthusiasm that was shared by every single attendee to pursue these projects. Some of the students were keen on booking their slot for next year’s Summer School.

An important part of AMSS is the carefully planned set of talks and workshops aimed at sharing advanced aspects of Mathematica and providing insight into how we do things internally at Wolfram Research. This year’s talks covered topics such as numerical computing, the dynamic capabilities of Mathematica 7, data paclets, parallel computing, image processing, Wolfram Workbench, webMathematica, and many more. There was even a session where students could share what features they would like to see in future versions of Mathematica.

We know that this Summer School experience is just the beginning of a much stronger relationship with all the people who attended. You can see some of the students’ reactions to this year’s Summer School in this video. We have already started planning for 2010—stay tuned for more information!