Another great day at the Wolfram Technology Conference 2010! Wolfram Co-founder Theodore Gray kicked off the morning with his presentation on ebook publishing. Using his own ebook The Elements, he demonstrated how he used Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha to create a publication that is uniquely interactive and has been a runaway success with consumers, ranking #1 in the Apple Store. According to Theo, his company Touch Press is working on several more ebooks already.

Today’s Birds of a Feather sessions were about starting and maintaining successful Mathematica user groups. Members of the Washington, DC Area Special Interest Group (DC-Area SIG) were there to give attendees tips on creating and keeping enthusiasm for Mathematica user groups.

During the afternoon break, there was a book signing by Salvatore Mangano for his Mathematica Cookbook.

Today we were able to see two more of the featured speaker talks. In an attempt to simulate a complex insurance model to explore issues of wealth and equality that are created by insurer underwriting practices, Seth Chandler used Mathematica to overcome what he saw as his main challenge: to develop mathematical functions that would accurately describe this complex system in a way that’s both accurate and able to be executed in thousandths of seconds for thousands of people.

Yves Papegay used Mathematica to analyze French voting results. He performed statistical analyses and built models to predict future voter outcomes based on historical and recent data on French elections. Could we apply the same model to the November 2 elections here in the U.S.?

It’s hard to believe there’s only one more day of this year’s conference! Tune in tomorrow for more…