Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Date Archive: 2016 October

Leading Edge

Less Than Five Lines of Code

Software engineer and longtime Mathematica user Chad Slaughter uses the Wolfram Language to facilitate interdepartmental communication during software development. While most programming languages are designed to do one thing particularly well, developers like Slaughter often find that the Wolfram Language is more versatile: "With traditional C++, in order to develop a program, it's going to take several hundred lines of code to do anything interesting. With Mathematica, I can do something interesting in less than five lines of code."
Announcements & Events

Announcing Wolfram SystemModeler 4.3

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Today I am excited to announce SystemModeler 4.3. This release focuses on three key areas: model analytics, collaboration and performance, which I will illustrate in this blog. You can see more on the What's New page, or download a trial to try it yourself. I'll start by talking about our improvements in collaboration. I develop lots of models in SystemModeler, and when I do, I seldom develop them in a vacuum. Either I send a model to my colleagues for them to use, I receive one from them or models get sent back and forth while we work on them together. This is, of course, also true for novice users. A great way to learn how to use SystemModeler---or any product, for that matter---is to look at things other people have done, whether it be a coworker or other users online, and build upon that. Whether you send your models to other people, receive models or send models between your own platforms, we want to make sure that you have everything you need to start using the model, straight out of the box. As an example, I have built a model of an inverted pendulum using the PlanarMechanics library. It has a linear-quadratic regulator built using the Modelica Standard Library, and it also includes components from the ModelPlug library that connect to real-life hardware, such as actuators and sensors on an Arduino board (or any other board following the Firmata protocol).
Announcements & Events

Wolfram Data Summit 2016

Wolfram continues to be at the forefront of data science innovation. We invite you to check out the latest here. This past September, we hosted our annual Wolfram Data Summit in Fairfax, Virginia. Over the past seven years, the Data Summit has come to occupy a central place at the nexus of data, computation and business. This high-level gathering of data innovators brings together people from many backgrounds and provides them the opportunity to share their challenges and breakthroughs in analyzing, managing and disseminating data. With its emphasis on cross-pollination, the Wolfram Data Summit has emerged as an exciting place to share insight into the subtle differences and unique challenges presented by data in different domains. New and unexpected points of commonality emerge from these conversations, allowing participants to trade solutions to emergent data problems.
Education & Academic

New in the Wolfram Language: Ask

Making web forms should be dead simple. That has been one of our goals at Wolfram Research since the release of the Wolfram Cloud. We've made smart input fields, powered by Wolfram|Alpha technology, that understand almost anything users type. We've designed FormFunction and APIFunction so that you can build forms and APIs with the same readable syntax. And now with the newest version of the Wolfram Language, you can build interactive web forms with dynamic branching and control flow using the Ask family of functions.

Education & Academic

Draw Anything and Win Hackathons with the Wolfram Language

After 36 hours, two math graduate students created Draw Anything, the grand prize--winning, Wolfram Cloud--powered app, at the MHacks V hackathon. We've written about Olivia Walch and Matt Jacobs's winning iOS app before. Now, the pair of prize-winning Wolfram hackers have taken the time to talk with us about how they used the Wolfram Language and fast Fourier transforms to create step-by-step drawing guides for any input image---whether it's a picture of Homer Simpson, a dog, yourself or your future dream car.