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Consolidate Wolfram Logins for Education with Single Sign‑On

I’ll begin this blog post by admitting that I personally have forgotten many passwords in my lifetime. If you’re like me (which I’m sure you are in this regard), you use many online tools and websites that require a login and password. We also know it’s wise practice to use a variety of passwords and to change them frequently. We hope a new feature of Mathematica Online has made this a little less daunting for you in your educational settings.

Kelvin Mischo, Enterprise Accounts Manager, Academic Sales
Announcements & Events

Crop Production Forecasts and Groundwater Trends Based on the Predator–Prey Model

Ever since Thomas Robert Malthus’s book An Essay on the Principle of Population, scientists have sought to determine the limit to the growth of human population due to finite resources. One such resource is groundwater. About 40% of global food production ultimately depends on irrigation and, increasingly, the source of irrigation water is groundwater aquifers. Groundwater irrigation allows farmers to increase crop yields, maintain them in dry spells and overcome temporal mismatches between growing seasons and seasonal rain. In many parts of the world, groundwater withdrawal (or pumping from wells) exceeds recharge, leading to groundwater depletion. In these regions, the “lifespan” of groundwater aquifers is limited, putting a bound on the amount of irrigation per year and the sustainability of groundwater-based agriculture. The goal of this study was to propose a dynamical systems framework capable of explaining past trends in groundwater-based irrigation and providing forecasts of food production.

Assaad Mrad, Guest Author
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.

Koji Maruyama, Sales Engineer
Announcements & Events

AI and the Wolfram Language Work toward Partial Automation in the Search for Cancer

NOTE: The following post contains real medical images.

As more technology is folded into medical environments all over the world, Wolfram’s European branch has taken on work with the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) in an effort to partially automate the process of cancer diagnosis. The task is to use machine learning to avoid checking thousands of similar-looking images of people’s insides by hand for signs of cancer.

Sjoerd Smit, Wolfram Europe
Education & Academic

15 Ways Wolfram|Alpha Can Help with Your Classes

We all know Wolfram|Alpha is great for solving calculations and math problems, but not everyone knows about the full breadth of useful data it provides. I entered college as a biology major and was quickly overwhelmed with the amount of information I had to memorize. Class lectures moved at a fast pace, and often my notes had gaps in them where I hadn’t finished writing down what the professor was saying before she moved on. I was up late at night making flashcards for tests and searching desperately through Yahoo! Answers, trying to find information like what exactly the alimentary system does (hint: it “functions in food ingestion and digestion; absorption of water and nutrients; secretion of water, acids, enzymes, buffers and salts; waste excretion; and energy storage”—thanks, Wolfram|Alpha!).

Thinking back on those late-night study sessions, I would have saved a lot of time if I had properly used Wolfram|Alpha as a study tool. Because I was a biology major, many of the areas in which I most frequently sought information were related to scientific fields such as chemistry, but Wolfram|Alpha can be a valuable resource in so many more areas. Here are 15 applications of Wolfram|Alpha in topics beyond mathematics. I hope you will find these to be useful both inside and outside the classroom!

Zoe Goldenfeld, Business Analysis
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
Computation & Analysis

Crafty Computation: Cross-Stitch Patterns with the Wolfram Language

For many of us, programming represents leisure time just as much as work. Here at Wolfram, we have an incredibly creative group with a wide variety of hobbies, on the screen and off—including textile arts like cross-stitch. So when my colleague Jay suggested that I create a cross-stitch program using the Wolfram Language, I replied with “Challenge accepted!” Jay was looking for a simple way to generate a cross-stitch pattern from a photograph—or really any image—with the colors corresponding to the DMC thread ID numbers. We both knew that the image-processing capabilities of the Wolfram Language would make this an easy task, but incorporating the DMC thread catalog seemed a more interesting challenge. Armed with both computer and (virtual) thread, I set out on my quest to create the perfect cross-stitch pattern generator.

Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Announcements & Events

We’re Building Our Own ERP System: Ten Game-Changing Insights We Discovered along the Way

When people think about Wolfram technology, corporate enterprise resource management (ERP) isn't the first thing that comes to mind. It certainly wasn't our first thought when we started searching for a new solution to manage our own accounting, customer service, licensing and HR needs. But after looking at the current ERP offerings, we found that none of the existing buy-in options did what we wanted.

So we thought, why not build our own?

The resulting project has been a revelation. Not only have we built something to our taste, but something fundamentally different: a new architecture, new interfaces, a new approach. Using Wolfram technology has not only made development easier; it has given us a revolutionary new perspective. By leveraging our uniquely powerful technology stack—and integrating it tightly with the existing infrastructure—we're redefining what an ERP system can be.

Daniel Bigham, Business Systems R&D
Announcements & Events

The Winners of the 2019 One-Liner Competition

This year's Wolfram Technology Conference was host to the eighth annual One-Liner Competition, an event where attendees show us the most astounding things they can accomplish with 128 or fewer characters of Wolfram Language code. Submissions included games, card tricks and yoga exercises, all implemented with less than one tweet's worth of the Wolfram Language.

Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
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