Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

News, Views & Insights

Date Archive: 2018 June

Computation & Analysis

The Shape of the Vote: Exploring Congressional Districts with Computation

In the past few decades, the process of redistricting has moved squarely into the computational realm, and with it the political practice of gerrymandering. But how can one solve the problem of equal representation mathematically? And what can be done to test the fairness of districts? In this post I’ll take a deeper dive with the Wolfram Language—using data exploration with Import and Association, built-in knowledge through the Entity framework and various GeoGraphics visualizations to better understand how redistricting works, where issues can arise and how to identify the effects of gerrymandering.

Brian Wood, Technical Communications & Outreach Manager
Current Events & History

We’ve Come a Long Way in 30 Years (But You Haven’t Seen Anything Yet!)

Technology for the Long Term

On June 23 we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the launch of Mathematica. Most software from 30 years ago is now long gone. But not Mathematica. In fact, it feels in many ways like even after 30 years, we're really just getting started. Our mission has always been a big one: to make the world as computable as possible, and to add a layer of computational intelligence to everything. Our first big application area was math (hence the name "Mathematica"). And we've kept pushing the frontiers of what's possible with math. But over the past 30 years, we've been able to build on the framework that we defined in Mathematica 1.0 to create the whole edifice of computational capabilities that we now call the Wolfram Language---and that corresponds to Mathematica as it is today. From when I first began to design Mathematica, my goal was to create a system that would stand the test of time, and would provide the foundation to fill out my vision for the future of computation. It's exciting to see how well it's all worked out. My original core concepts of language design continue to infuse everything we do. And over the years we've been able to just keep building and building on what's already there, to create a taller and taller tower of carefully integrated capabilities. It's fun today to launch Mathematica 1.0 on an old computer, and compare it with today:
Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

Launching the Wolfram Neural Net Repository

Today, we are excited to announce the official launch of the Wolfram Neural Net Repository! A huge amount of work has gone into training or converting around 70 neural net models that now live in the repository, and can be accessed programmatically in the Wolfram Language via NetModel:
✕ net = NetModel["ResNet-101 Trained on ImageNet Competition Data"]
✕ net[]
Neural nets have generated a lot of interest recently, and rightly so: they form the basis for state-of-the-art solutions to a dizzying array of problems, from speech recognition to machine translation, from autonomous driving to playing Go. Fortunately, the Wolfram Language now has a state-of-the-art neural net framework (and a growing tutorial collection). This has made possible a whole new set of Wolfram Language functions, such as FindTextualAnswer, ImageIdentify, ImageRestyle and FacialFeatures. And deep learning will no doubt play an important role in our continuing mission to make human knowledge computable.
Sebastian Bodenstein, et al.