Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Date Archive: 2018 March

Announcements & Events

Unleash Your Models with SystemModeler 5.1

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. We are excited to announce the latest installment in the Wolfram SystemModeler series, Version 5.1, where our primary focus has been on pushing the scope of use for models of systems beyond the initial stages of development.

Since 2012, SystemModeler has been used in a wide variety of fields with an even larger number of goals—such as optimizing the fuel consumption of a car, finding the optimal dosage of a drug for liver disease and maximizing the lifetime of a battery system. The Version 5.1 update expands SystemModeler beyond its previous usage horizons to include a whole host of options, such as:

Exporting models in a form that includes a full simulation engine, which makes them usable in a wide variety of tools Providing the right interface for your models so that they are easy for others to explore and analyze Sharing models with millions of users with the simulation core now included in the Wolfram Language
Education & Academic

User Research: Deep Learning for Gravitational Wave Detection with the Wolfram Language

Daniel George is a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Wolfram Summer School alum and Wolfram intern whose award-winning research on deep learning for gravitational wave detection recently landed in the prestigious pages of Physics Letters B in a special issue commemorating the Nobel Prize in 2017. We sat down with Daniel to learn more about his research and how the Wolfram Language plays a part in it.
Announcements & Events

Roaring into 2018 with Another Big Release: Launching Version 11.3 of the Wolfram Language & Mathematica

The Release Pipeline

Last September we released Version 11.2 of the Wolfram Language and Mathematica—with all sorts of new functionality, including 100+ completely new functions. Version 11.2 was a big release. But today we’ve got a still bigger release: Version 11.3 that, among other things, includes nearly 120 completely new functions.

This June 23rd it’ll be 30 years since we released Version 1.0, and I'm very proud of the fact that we’ve now been able to maintain an accelerating rate of innovation and development for no less than three decades. Critical to this, of course, has been the fact that we use the Wolfram Language to develop the Wolfram Language—and indeed most of the things that we can now add in Version 11.3 are only possible because we’re making use of the huge stack of technology that we’ve been systematically building for more than 30 years.

We’ve always got a large pipeline of R&D underway, and our strategy for .1 versions is to use them to release everything that’s ready at a particular moment in time. Sometimes what's in a .1 version may not completely fill out a new area, and some of the functions may be tagged as “experimental”. But our goal with .1 versions is to be able to deliver the latest fruits of our R&D efforts on as timely a basis as possible. Integer (.0) versions aim to be more systematic, and to provide full coverage of new areas, rounding out what has been delivered incrementally in .1 versions.

In addition to all the new functionality in 11.3, there’s a new element to our process. Starting a couple of months ago, we began livestreaming internal design review meetings that I held as we brought Version 11.3 to completion. So for those interested in “how the sausage is made”, there are now almost 122 hours of recorded meetings, from which you can find out exactly how some of the things you can now see released in Version 11.3 were originally invented. And in this post, I'm going to be linking to specific recorded livestreams relevant to features I'm discussing.

What’s New?

OK, so what’s new in Version 11.3? Well, a lot of things. And, by the way, Version 11.3 is available today on both desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux) and the Wolfram Cloud. (And yes, it takes extremely nontrivial software engineering, management and quality assurance to achieve simultaneous releases of this kind.)
Computation & Analysis

Web Scraping with the Wolfram Language, Part 1: Importing and Interpreting

Do you want to do more with data available on the web? Meaningful data exploration requires computation—and the Wolfram Language is well suited to the tasks of acquiring and organizing data. I'll walk through the process of importing information from a webpage into a Wolfram Notebook and extracting specific parts for basic computation. Throughout this post, I'll be referring to this website hosted by the National Weather Service, which gives 7-day forecasts for locations in the western US: