Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Date Archive: 2013 April

Design & Visualization

Gigapixel Images in Mathematica

Professional cameras offer a resolution of 50 megapixels and more. In addition, projects like GigaPan allow one to create gigapixel panoramas with billions of pixels. How can we process these images on a desktop computer with 8 GB of RAM? One of Mathematica 9's new and exciting features is out-of-core image processing. What does the out-of-core term really mean? It is a way to process very large images that are too big to fit into main memory. Let's say we have a machine with 8 GB of RAM, and let's assume that Mathematica can use up to 7.2 GB of that memory (the remaining 0.8 GB will be used by the operating system). Freshly started, Mathematica 9 on Windows 8 takes up about 200 MB of memory, so the kernel can use about 7 GB of RAM. What is the maximal size of the image that we can load into the kernel (we don't want to visualize it at this point)? If we assume that the image is in the RGB color space and a single byte encoding, then the following formula gives a maximal width (and height) of an image that can be loaded at once into the memory:
Announcements & Events

Sooner or Later: Computable Academic Data

Next month I'm on a discussion panel at The Now and Future of Data Publishing symposium in Oxford, UK. I'm expecting this to be a good day and, if you're in the area, I recommend you think about coming along (it's free!). We're very interested in academic data. Over the past 20 years or so, publishers have changed in some big ways, such as shifting from print to online or adopting new open access business models. But one thing they haven't fully tackled yet is how to handle the increasingly large amounts of data coming out of academic research.
Best of Blog

Data Science of the Facebook World

More than a million people have now used our Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook. And as part of our latest update, in addition to collecting some anonymized statistics, we launched a Data Donor program that allows people to contribute detailed data to us for research purposes. A few weeks ago we decided to start analyzing all this data. And I have to say that if nothing else it's been a terrific example of the power of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language for doing data science. (It'll also be good fodder for the Data Science course I'm starting to create.) We'd always planned to use the data we collect to enhance our Personal Analytics system. But I couldn't resist also trying to do some basic science with it. I've always been interested in people and the trajectories of their lives. But I've never been able to combine that with my interest in science. Until now. And it's been quite a thrill over the past few weeks to see the results we've been able to get. Sometimes confirming impressions I've had; sometimes showing things I never would have guessed. And all along reminding me of phenomena I've studied scientifically in A New Kind of Science. So what does the data look like? Here are the social networks of a few Data Donors---with clusters of friends given different colors. (Anyone can find their own network using Wolfram|Alpha---or the SocialMediaData function in Mathematica.)
Computation & Analysis

Exploding Art: da Vinci Code of Another Sort

What does programming have to do with a passion for the arts and history? Well, if you turn education into a game and add a bit of coding, then you can easily end up in the realm of a modern paradigm called, fancily, "gamification." Though gamification is a very wide concept based on game use in non-game contexts (design, security, marketing, even protein folding, you name it), at heart it is very simple: play, have fun, and get things done. I may have oversimplified things here for the sake of a rhyme, but if you bear with my lengthy prelude, we may just see a simple case of turning passion into software. My obsession with diagrams and simple line drawings began almost unnoticeably in the winter of 2003 in New York City after attending an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: "the first comprehensive survey of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings ever presented in America." You may think it'd be a drag---crowds marching very slowly in a single long line coiling through the exhibition hallways. But perception of time transforms when you stare at 500-year-old craft. I think it was then that it started to dawn on me what special value a first sketch has. A first act when an idea, something very subjective, evasive, living solely inside one's mind, materializes as a solid reality, now perceivable by another human being. Imagine it happened ages ago. Wouldn't you be curious what was going on at that moment in time, what got frozen in this piece of craft in front of you?
Announcements & Events

Seats Are Available for the Wolfram Virtual Conference Spring 2013

The Wolfram Virtual Conference Spring 2013 brings together in one event many popular topics featuring the latest in Wolfram technologies. Join us on April 16, 1–4:30pm US EDT (5–8:30pm GMT), for this free online conference that offers presentations for a wide range of interests, showing you how to get the most out of Mathematica, the Computable Document Format, Wolfram SystemModeler, and Wolfram|Alpha.