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Computation & Analysis

Wolfram Community Highlights: Animation, Chernoff Faces, Fingerprint ID, and More

Wolfram Community members continue to create amazing applications and visuals. Take a look at a few of our recent favorites. Wolfram Language animations make it easier to understand and investigate concepts and phenomena. They're also just plain fun. Among recent simple but stunning animations, you'll find "Deformations of the Cairo Tiling" and "Contours of a Singular Surface" by Clayton Shonkwiler, a mathematician and artist interested in geometric models of physical systems, and "Transit of Mercury 2016" by Sander Huisman, a postdoc in Lyon, France, researching Lagrangian turbulence.
Emily Suess, Technical Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Announcements & Events

Ready? Review. Register: The 2016 Wolfram Technology Conference Is on the Way!

Mark your calendars now for the 2016 Wolfram Technology Conference! Join us October 18--21 at Wolfram headquarters in Champaign, Illinois, where we'll be getting things off to an exciting start with a keynote address by Wolfram founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram on Tuesday, October 18 at 5pm. Our conference gives developers and colleagues a rare opportunity for face-to-face discussion of the latest developments and features for cloud computing, interactive deployment, mobile devices, and more. Arrive early for pre-conference training opportunities, and come ready to participate in hands-on workshops, nonstop networking opportunities, and the Wolfram Language One-Liner Competition, just to name a few activities. We are also looking for users to share their own stories and interests! Submit your presentation proposal by July 15 for full consideration. Last year's lineup included everything from political data science to winning hackathon solutions to programming in the Wolfram Cloud... and literally almost everything in between. Review a sampling of the 2015 talks below, or visit our website for more. Commanding the Wolfram Cloud---Todd Gayley
Wolfram Blog Team
Computation & Analysis

Wolfram Community Highlights: LEGO, SCOTUS, Minecraft, and More!

Wolfram Community members continue to amaze us. Take a look at a few of the fun and clever ideas shared by our members in the first part of 2016. How to LEGO-fy Your Plots and 3D Models, by Sander Huisman This marvel by Sander Huisman, a postdoc from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, attracted more than 6,000 views in one day and was trending on Reddit, Hacker News, and other social media channels. Huisman's code iteratively covers layers with bricks of increasingly smaller sizes, alternating in the horizontal x and y directions. Read the full post to see how to turn your own plots, 3D scans, and models into brick-shaped masterpieces.
Emily Suess, Technical Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Computation & Analysis

What Are the Odds?

"What are the odds?" This phrase is often tossed around to point out seemingly coincidental occurrences, and it's normally intended as a rhetorical question. Most people won't even wager a guess; they know that the implied answer is usually "very slim." However, I always find myself fascinated by this question. I like to think about the events leading up to a situation and what sorts of unseen mechanisms might be at work. I interpret the question as a challenge, an exciting topic worthy of discussion. In some cases the odds may seem incalculable---and I'll admit it's not always easy. However, a quick investigation of the surrounding mathematics can give you a lot of insight. Hopefully after reading this post, you'll have a better answer the next time someone asks, "What are the odds?"
Brian Wood, Technical Communications & Outreach Manager
Computation & Analysis

Wolfram Community Highlights: Medicine, Drones, KenKen, and More!

With some impressive new features, new forums, and many new members, Wolfram Community has had a great year. As we approach the end of 2015, we wanted to share a few highlights from the last few months' excellent posts on the Wolfram Community site.

Drones

Interested in drones? Check out these posts. Connecting ROS to the Wolfram Language, Or Controlling a Parrot ArDrone 2.0 from Mathematica, by Loris Gliner, a student in aeronautical engineering. Loris Gliner used his time in the Wolfram mentorship program to work out how to connect the Wolfram Language to the Linux Robot Operating System. He includes code examples and a video showing the flight of a Parrot ArDrone 2.0 controlled via the Wolfram Language.
Kathryn Cramer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Computation & Analysis

The 2015 One-Liner Competition Winners

The One-Liner Competition has become a tradition at our annual Wolfram Technology Conference. It's an opportunity for some of the most talented Wolfram Language developers to show the world what amazing things can be done with a mere 128 characters of Wolfram Language code. More than any other programming language, the Wolfram Language gives you a wealth of sophisticated built-in algorithms that you can combine and recombine to do things you wouldn't think possible without reams of computer code. This year's One-Liner submissions showed the diversity of the language. There were news monitors, sonifications, file system indexers, web mappers, geographic mappers, anatomical visualizations, retro graphics, animations, hypnotic dynamic graphics, and web data miners... all implemented with 128 or fewer characters. The first of three honorable mentions went to Richard Gass for his New York Times Word Cloud. With 127 characters of Wolfram Language code, he builds a word cloud of topics on the current New York Times front page by pulling nouns out of the headlines:
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Computation & Analysis

The Coffee “Flavor-Rator”

I drink too much coffee---it's one of my few vices. Recently, my favorite espresso machine at the Wolfram Research headquarters in Champaign, Illinois, was replaced with a fancy new combination coffee and espresso maker. The coffee now comes in little pouches of various flavors, ranging from "light and smooth" to "dark and intense". There even is a "hot chocolate" pouch and a way to make cappuccinos using both a "froth" pouch and an "espresso" pouch. Here is a picture of the new coffee selection:
Arnoud Buzing, Director of Quality and Release Management
Computation & Analysis

Wolfram Language Artificial Intelligence: The Image Identification Project

“What is this a picture of?” Humans can usually answer such questions instantly, but in the past it’s always seemed out of reach for computers to do this. For nearly 40 years I’ve been sure computers would eventually get there—but I’ve wondered when. I’ve built systems that give computers all sorts of intelligence, much of […]

Stephen Wolfram
Computation & Analysis

Spring Planting, Autumn Harvest

Spring is here, finally, and everyone around here is tired of snow this year! Some of the hardier flowers are up already, such as daffodils and hyacinths. So, naturally, I started thinking about when I could put in the more delicate annuals, or even my tomatoes. I don't want them to be bitten by a late frost (we had one the other day!). And in the autumn, we want to know how late we can harvest before a frost might damage the produce. Well, I could consult The Old Farmer's Almanac for the last frost date, but how accurate is it for my specific locale? What about the variability? Might there be a trend to earlier dates due to global warming? To answer these questions, I need historical temperature data. The Wolfram Language has weather data available, so maybe I could do a little data mining and come up with our own planting chart, and you could for your town, too.
Robert Nachbar, Project Director, Consulting
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