News, Views & Insights
Welcome to the Wolfram Technology Conference 2010
The Wolfram Technology Conference 2010 is off to a great start! In his opening keynote, Wolfram Research Founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram unveiled the forthcoming Mathematica 8. Through real-time demonstrations, attendees got to see many of the new features at work, including enhanced image processing capabilities, texture mapping, control systems, wavelet analysis, and much more. Over 500 new functions are being added in Version 8—almost the same as the total amount included in the original Version 1!
This year’s schedule covers a broad range of topics presented by users and Wolfram developers, including applications for probability and statistics, CUDA and Open CL programming, creating visualizations with Mathematica, and high-performance computation.
Did you notice the featured speakers area on the conference website? We got to see the first of these talks today! Luc Barthelet shared his experiences with modeling objects in Mathematica and printing them in 3D. Luc told us what he learned about the design process, and gave a few tips to help us better create our own designs.
New to the agenda are the Birds of a Feather sessions. Today’s session was about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Educators, developers, and members of our academic initiatives team discussed STEM and how Mathematica can help with STEM programs. For more about how Wolfram Research helps educators and students get Mathematica and the training they need, visit the STEM Initiative page.
Roger Germundsson, Director of Research & Development at Wolfram Research, introduced the new statistics and probability functions that will be available in Version 8. He described them as “high-level, intuitive, general, and powerful, and the world’s largest collection of parametric distributions as used in many domains, such as finance, actuarial science, communications, reliability, risk, and so on.”
Another new addition for conference attendees this year is the Mathematica One-Liner Competition. Attendees are encouraged to create the most impressive and surprising output with 140 characters or less of Mathematica code. Prizes will be awarded during the Friday evening dinner.
Attendees, don’t forget to send in your questions for our developers! Solutions will be discussed during the two-hour problem-solving clinic on Friday.
Tomorrow promises to be just as exciting, with more sessions from our featured speakers, another Birds of a Feather session, and even a book signing! Stay tuned to the Wolfram Blog for more details.
Congrats to a good start! Is there a way for Mathematica users to take advantage of the conference without physically being there? i.e. can the speakers’ presentation note be available on the conference site?
So when is Mathematica 8 coming out? When will premier service customers get it?
I’m also not there :-(
Can someone ask if c.d.format will come with M8 next month? Will it have drm capacities?
The price of Player Pro is prohibitive in my line of business. I need a free way of delivering interactive documents, assuring code privacy (and, if possible, also restricting document copy).
Regards,
I also support the view Samuel Chen. It will be great for all the Mathematica lovers who can’t go to Illinois due to different reasons. However they all eagerly awaits the outcome of the developer conference. I hope wolfram research will take some initiative to share the information with us in some way. It is for the sake of Mathematical research and the respectable openness of science. Knowledge once shared will open up more and more horizons.
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Through real-time demonstrations, attendees got to see many of the new features at work, including enhanced image processing capabilities, texture mapping, control systems, wavelet analysis, and much more. Over 500 new functions are being added in Version 8—almost the same as the total amount included in the original Version 1!
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This is nice and all, but there is one important feature that Wolfram keeps NOT including in these updates, and that is aggressive support for parallelism — first at the SSE/AVX level, next at the multi-core level. At the very least, I should be able to get /@, Sum, etc to automatically run in parallel on my local machine — I should not have to type ParallelMap etc, and I should not have to export definitions from one Mathematica kernel to other Mathematica kernels. Beyond that, there are a huge number of internal functions, from numerical integration to plotting to searches over a large space (integration, minimization etc) that are fairly easily parallelized.
Come on guys — the 1990s and ever faster CPUs are not coming back, and trying to pretend that the future is not massive parallelism is just wasting everyone’s time. What the world needs is not a nice implementation of the Bilbo Baggins’s WWW function, a function used by the world community a grand total of three times last year, but ongoing rewriting of the kernel guts to aggressively support multiple CPUs (and multiple is only going to grow — it was two CPUs in 2008, it is 4 CPUs now, it will be 8 CPUs in 2012).
Yes there are hard parallelism problems — but no-one is even asking you to solve those yet. All we want is for at least the most basic low-lying fruit to be picked up today, with a promise that there’ll be more parallelism added with each release.
I’d agree with Maynard Handley. Instead of putting resources into another search engine that does little other thank make homework easier, and is not profitable, why not focus on the core business and make Mathematica more robust?
@Dudley Burns
You don’t think that Wolfram makes any money with WA? Already with the iPhone app they made quite a bit of money, and i’m sure they have some collaborations with companies (microsoft and others).