Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

News, Views & Insights

Date Archive: 2020 January

Education & Academic

Advance Your Image Processing Knowledge with the Latest Wolfram U Course

Today, the world around us is being captured by imaging devices ranging from cell phones and action cameras to microscopes and telescopes. With ever-increasing generation of images, image processing and automatic image analysis are used in a wide range of individual, academic and industry applications.

We are excited to announce Introduction to Image Processing, a free interactive course from Wolfram U, which makes cutting-edge image processing simple with graphical and visual examples that demonstrate how image operations work. It includes 14 video lessons, each lasting 20 minutes or fewer, and 5 short quizzes, as well as a certificate for finishing all course materials. Topics range from how to control brightness and contrast or crop and resize images, to advanced topics including segmentation, image enhancement, feature detection and using machine learning to perform modern image processing—no machine learning knowledge necessary!

Shadi Ashnai, Manager of Sound & Vision, Algorithms R&D Mariusz Jankowski, Algorithms R&D
Best of Blog

Invasion of the Stink Bugs: 20 Years of Marmorated Mayhem in One Map

Who has not encountered a stink bug? Perhaps the better question is not if, but when. I remember well my first interactions with stink bugs—partly because of their pungent, cilantro-like odor, but also because in my native Catalan language they are called Bernat pudent ("stinky Bernat") and Bernat is my twin brother's name.

So when I encountered the stink bug again when visiting Champaign, Illinois, for the 2019 Wolfram Technology Conference, it brought up a lot of fond childhood memories. This time, however, two things had changed: the frequency of encounters with the stink bug seemed exponentially greater, and I now had the Wolfram Language to more fully (and computationally) satisfy my curiosity about this reviled insect and its growing impact on our ecosystem. So to get a better picture of the arrival and spread of this invasive bug across the US, I used available observation data and the Wolfram Language to make a map of sightings over the past two decades.

Jofre Espigulé-Pons, Machine Learning
Computation & Analysis

Biodiversity, Wealth Distribution, Mandelbrot Sets and More: Wolfram Community Highlights

It’s been another busy few months on Wolfram Community! If you’ve kept up with the latest posts, you may have noticed that many are live, interactive notebooks embedded directly from the Wolfram Cloud. Take advantage of this feature for your next post on the Community: when authoring your post, use the "Add Notebook" button in the post editor. Learn more about embedding Wolfram Cloud notebooks directly on your website from the Wolfram Notebook Embedder documentation (or download the JavaScript library directly).

We’ve gathered some of our favorite Wolfram Community posts showing the variety of applications made possible with the Wolfram Language.

Chapin Langenheim, Editor & Web Project Coordinator, Project Management
Education & Academic

3 Free Wolfram U Webinars Showcasing Innovative Data Science Applications

Looking to fulfill your New Year's resolution of learning new data science skills? Join Wolfram U for Wolfram Technology in Action: Data Science, a three-part web series demonstrating a range of data science applications in the Wolfram Language. These 90-minute sessions feature recorded talks from the 2019 Wolfram Technology Conference, along with live presentations by Wolfram staff scientists, application developers, software engineers and Wolfram Language users who apply the technology every day to their business operations and research.

Newcomers to Wolfram technology are welcome, as are longtime users wanting to see the latest functionality in the language.

Jamie Peterson, Director, Wolfram U
Education & Academic

Fire in the Hole! Exploring the Yellowstone Calderas with GeoGraphics and USGS Data

Yellowstone National Park has long been known for its active geysers. These geysers are a surface indication of subterranean volcanic activity in the park. In fact, Yellowstone is actually the location of the Yellowstone Caldera, a supervolcano: a volcano with an exceptionally large magma reservoir. The park has had a history of many explosive eruptions over the last two million years or so.

I’ve found that the United States Geological Survey (USGS) maintains data on the various volcanic calderas and related features, which makes it perfect for computational exploration with the Wolfram Language. This data is in the form of SHP files and related data stored as a ZIP archive. Thanks to the detail of this available data, we can use the Wolfram Language and, in particular, GeoGraphics to get a better picture of what this data is telling us.

Jeff Bryant, Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Education & Academic

An Intriguing Identity: Connecting Distinct and Complete Integer Partitions

Number theory is a very old subject that in modern times has branched into various large areas. One of these is additive number theory, with problems like this: when is a prime the sum of two squares? Primes are part of the more classical area now called multiplicative number theory, so as this problem of Fermat’s indicates, the two areas are intimately connected. The problem I discuss in this blog is a mix of additive and multiplicative number theory, with a dash of linear algebra.

George Beck, Document & Media Systems
Education & Academic

Star Light, Star Bright: Stellar Aperture Photometry with the Wolfram Language

Stellar CCD aperture photometry is the technique of extracting information about the brightness of stars from a series of images collected over time. The light curve of a variable star can reveal useful information about the physics of the star, including a measure of its intrinsic brightness. Light curve analysis can yield information about eclipsing binary systems, and also lead to exoplanet discoveries when a planet alters the brightness of a star by crossing its disk as viewed from Earth.

In CCD photometry, we want to be able to determine a measure of the amount of radiation coming from a given star arriving on our CCD detector. Plotted as a function of time, this measurement can reveal important information about the star or star system.

Tom Sherlock, User Interface Developer, User Interfaces