Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

News, Views & Insights

Date Archive: 2014 December

Education & Academic

Serial Interface Control of Astronomical Telescopes

As an amateur astronomer, I'm always interested in ways to use Mathematica in my hobby. In earlier blog posts, I've written about how Mathematica can be used to process and improve images taken of planets and nebulae. However, I'd like to be able to control my astronomical hardware directly with the Wolfram Language. In particular, I've been curious about using the Wolfram Language as a way to drive my telescope mount, for the purpose of automating an observing session. There is precedent for this because some amateurs use their computerized telescopes to hunt down transient phenomena like supernovas. Software already exists for performing many of the tasks that astronomers engage in—locating objects, managing data, and performing image processing. However, it would be quite cool to automate all the different tasks associated with an observing session from one notebook. Mathematica is highly useful because it can perform many of these operations in a unified manner. For example, Mathematica incorporates a vast amount of useful astronomical data, including the celestial coordinates of hundreds of thousands of stars, nebula, galaxies, asteroids, and planets. In addition to this, Mathematica's image processing and data handling functionality are extremely useful when processing astronomical data.
Tom Sherlock, User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Products

Systems Pharmacology—A Case Study on Type 2 Diabetes Using Wolfram Technologies

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. In April this year, I attended the 7th Noordwijkerhout Symposium on Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics and Systems Pharmacology in the Netherlands. The conference focuses on the use of mathematical modeling in pharmacology and pharmaceutical R&D, and this year, the main topic was the emerging concept of systems pharmacology. In general terms, systems pharmacology can be seen as the combination of pharmacometrics and systems biology, with one of its key principles being the integration of biological data and mathematical models describing several different levels of biological complexity—spanning from the molecular or cellular level to that of a whole organism or population. Usually, such integration of data and models is referred to as multilevel, or multiscale, modeling, and has the important benefit of allowing us to translate information on disease and drug effects from the biochemical level—where the effects originate—to changes on the whole body or population level, which are more important from a clinical and pharmacological point of view. In this blog post, I thought we would take a closer look at what a systems pharmacology approach might look like. Specifically, I'll focus on some of the practical aspects of building complex, multilevel biological models, and how these can be dealt with using Wolfram SystemModeler.
Robert Palmer, Applications Engineer
Education & Academic

Wolfram|Alpha Apps and Math Course Apps for Windows—Just Released

Just in time for the holidays---Wolfram|Alpha apps for Windows and Windows Phone have been released! We’re excited to announce that our popular Wolfram|Alpha app and several Wolfram Course Assistant Apps are now available for your Windows 8.1 devices. The Wolfram|Alpha applications are universal apps, and utilize Windows’ distinct style while bringing to Windows users some of the features people have come to expect from Wolfram|Alpha: a custom keyboard for easily entering queries, a large selection of examples to explore Wolfram|Alpha’s vast knowledgebase, history to view your recent queries, favorites so you can easily answer your favorite questions, the ability to pin specific queries to the start menu, and more.
Wolfram Blog Team
Computation & Analysis

Deck the Halls: Tweet-a-Program Holiday Ornament Challenge

It's the holiday season, and Wolfram is gearing up for bright lights and winter weather by holding a new Tweet-a-Program challenge. To help us celebrate the holidays, tweet your best holiday ornament-themed lines of Wolfram Language code. As with our other challenges, we'll use the Wolfram Language to randomly select winning tweets (along with a few of our favorites) to pin, retweet, and share with our followers. If you're a lucky winner, we'll send you a free Wolfram T-shirt! If you need some help getting into the holiday spirit, check out these examples:
Wolfram Blog Team
Products

Machine Gun Jetpack: The Real Physics of Improbable Flight

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Could you fly using machine guns as the upward driving force? That's the question asked in Randall Munroe's What if? article, "Machine Gun Jetpack." It turns out you could, because some machine guns have enough thrust to lift their own weight, and then some. In this post, I'll explore the dynamics of shooting machine guns downward and study the actual forces, velocities, and heights that could be achieved. I'll also repeat the warning from the What if? post: Please do not try this at home. That's what we have modeling software for. Machine gun with a squirrel on top
Malte Lenz, Test Engineer, SystemModeler
Education & Academic

The Wolfram Language for the Hour of Code

Get ready, get set… code! It’s the time of year to get thinking about programming with the Hour of Code. For many years, Wolfram Research has promoted and supported initiatives that encourage computation, programming, and STEM education, and we are always thrilled when efforts are taken by others to do the same. Code.org, in conjunction with Computer Science Education Week, is sponsoring an event to encourage educators and organizations across the country to dedicate a single hour to coding. This hour gives kids (and adults, too!) a taste of what it means to study computer science---and how it can actually be a creative, fun, and fulfilling process. Millions of students participated in the Hour of Code in past years, and instructors are looking for more engaging activities for their students to try. Enter the Wolfram Language. Built into the Wolfram Language is the technology from Wolfram|Alpha that enables natural language input---and lets students create code just by writing English.
Adriana Rose, Business Development, Partnerships
Best of Blog

Extending Van Gogh’s Starry Night with Inpainting

Can computers learn to paint like Van Gogh? To some extent---definitely yes! For that, akin to human imitation artists, an algorithm should first be fed the original artists' creations, and then it will be able to generate a machine take on them. How well? Please judge for yourself. Second prize in the ZEISS photography competition Recently the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge announced the winners of the annual photography competition, "The Art of Engineering: Images from the Frontiers of Technology." The second prize went to Yarin Gal, a PhD student in the Machine Learning group, for his extrapolation of Van Gogh's painting Starry Night, shown above. Readers can view this and similar computer-extended images at Gal's website Extrapolated Art. An inpainting algorithm called PatchMatch was used to create the machine art, and in this post I will show how one can obtain similar effects using the Wolfram Language.
Piotr Wendykier, Algorithms R&D