Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Date Archive: 2020 November

Announcements & Events

A Virtual Face-off: Replaying the 2020 Livecoding Championship

In early October, by what at this point can only be a time-honored tradition, the Livecoding Championship returned in its fifth annual iteration as a special event during the 2020 Wolfram Technology Conference. As in preceding years, the championship offered top Wolfram Language programmers a chance to show off their knowledge, agility, typing speed and documentation-reading skills to an unfailingly adoring audience.

Follow along with this post by watching this recorded video of the 2020 Livecoding Championship livestream!

Computation & Analysis

Distinguishing Risks of Modes of Cardiac Death in Heart Failure with Machine Learning

In medical fields like cardiology, the Wolfram Language continues to help researchers make discoveries and predictions. I recently coauthored a study that uses the machine learning functionality of the Wolfram Language to predict risks of deaths due to heart failure. In it, we aimed to build a classifier that is capable of distinguishing the probabilities of cardiac death caused by end-stage heart failure (HFD) and severe arrhythmic events/sudden death (ArE). What follows is a summary of the paper we published earlier this year.

Education & Academic

Online Enrichment with Free Daily Study Groups

Students are spending countless hours online for classes this year, pushing educators to offer more engaging and worthwhile virtual content. We debuted Wolfram Daily Study Groups in early April with this in mind, and the results have far surpassed our expectations! Throughout this ongoing program, we’ve been able to keep students, professionals and lifelong learners engaged and connected in an enriching online community. With several Study Groups completed, and more in the works, we thought we’d share some of our successes so far.

Best of Blog

How Odd Was the Full Moon on Halloween 2020? Once in a Blue Moon and a Lifetime!

Halloween this year had a surprise up its sleeve. In rare celestial serendipity, the night of costume metamorphosis also featured a full moon, which helped to conjure the spooky mood. Because it might have been the first and last full-moon Halloween that some people witnessed in their lifetime (cue ominous music), I think it was significantly underrated. Moreover, it was the day of a blue moon (the second full moon within a month), but that is not a surprise, as any Halloween’s full moon is always a blue moon. The Moon’s color did not change, though, at least for those away from the smoke of volcanos and forest fires that are capable of turning it visibly blue. To appreciate the science and uniqueness of a full moon this Halloween, I built this visualization that tells the whole story in one picture. This is how I did it.