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Neural Networks: An Introduction

If you haven’t used machine learning, deep learning and neural networks yourself, you’ve almost certainly heard of them. You may be familiar with their commercial use in self-driving cars, image recognition, automatic text completion, text translation and other complex data analysis, but you can also train your own neural nets to accomplish tasks like identifying objects in images, generating sequences of text or segmenting pixels of an image. With the Wolfram Language, you can get started with machine learning and neural nets faster than you think. Since deep learning and neural networks are everywhere, let’s go ahead and explore what exactly they are and how you can start using them.

Tuseeta Banerjee, Research Scientist, Machine Learning
Computation & Analysis

The Art of Connecting the Dots with the Wolfram Language

Connect the dots. It was exciting to draw from number to number until the sudden discovery of a hidden cartoon. That was my inadvertent introduction to graph theory very early in school. Little did I know adults used the same concept to discover hidden patterns to solve problems, such as proving that a single crossing of seven Königsberg bridges to four land masses is not possible, but coloring a map distinctly with four colors is. These problems inspired the methods we know today as graph theory. And in honor of the work of late mathematician and connect-the-dot author Elwyn Berlekamp, we see how sophisticated this "child's play" can be by examining the different styles and themes we can apply to graphs.

Tim Shedelbower, Visualization Developer, Algorithms R&D
Announcements & Events

Fishackathon: Protecting Marine Life with AI and the Wolfram Language

Fishackathon

Every year, the U.S. Department of State sponsors a worldwide competition called Fishackathon. Its goal is to protect life in our waters by creating technological solutions to help solve problems related to fishing.

The first global competition was held in 2014 and has been growing massively every year. In 2018 the winning entry came from a five-person team from Boston, after competing against 45,000 people in 65 other cities spread across 5 continents. The participants comprised programmers, web and graphic designers, oceanographers and biologists, mathematicians, engineers and students who all worked tirelessly over the course of two days.

To find out more about the winning entry for Fishackathon in 2018 and how the Wolfram Language has helped make the seas safer, we sat down with Michael Sollami to learn more about him and his team’s solution to that year’s challenge.

Swede White, Public Relations Manager
Current Events & History

Drawing on Autopilot: Automated Plane (Geometry) Illustrations from The American Mathematical Monthly

Version 12 of the Wolfram Language introduces the functions GeometricScene, RandomInstance and FindGeometricConjectures for representing, drawing and reasoning about problems in plane geometry. In particular, abstract scene descriptions can be automatically supplied with coordinate values to produce diagrams satisfying the conditions of the scene. Let’s apply this functionality to some of the articles and problems about geometry appearing in the issues of The American Mathematical Monthly from February and March of 2019.

Dan McDonald, Lead Developer, Synthetic Geometry Project
Best of Blog

Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source—A Dozen Reasons

Over the years, I have been asked many times about my opinions on free and open-source software. Sometimes the questions are driven by comparison to some promising or newly fashionable open-source project, sometimes by comparison to a stagnating open-source project and sometimes by the belief that Wolfram technology would be better if it were open source.

At the risk of provoking the fundamentalist end of the open-source community, I thought I would share some of my views in this blog. While there are counterexamples to most of what I have to say, not every point applies to every project, and I am somewhat glossing over the different kinds of “free” and “open,” I hope I have crystallized some key points.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Current Events & History

Computing Exact Uncertainties—Physical Constants in the Current and in the New SI

Introduction

In the so-called "new SI," the updated version of the International System of Units that will define the seven base units (second, meter, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole and candela) and that goes into effect May 20 of 2019, all SI units will be definitionally based on exact values of fundamental constants of physics. And as a result, all the named units of the SI (newton, volt, ohm, pascal, etc.) will ultimately be expressible through fundamental constants. (Finally, fundamental physics will be literally ruling our daily life 😁.)

Here is how things will change from the evening of Monday, May 20, to the morning of Tuesday, May 21, of this year.

Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

Peppa Pig, Tracking Meteorite Trajectory and Computational Linguistics: Wolfram Community Highlights

Over the past 16 weeks, Wolfram Community has gained over 1,000 new members—surpassing 21,000 members total! We’ve also seen more activity, with 800,000 pageviews and 160,000 new readers in that time period. We enjoy seeing the interesting and unique projects Wolfram Language users come up with and are excited to share some of the posts that make Wolfram Community a favorite platform for sharing, socializing and networking.
Chapin Langenheim, Editor & Web Project Coordinator, Project Management
Computation & Analysis

3D Printing “Spikey” Commemorative Coins with the Wolfram Language

I approached my friend Frederick Wu and suggested that we should make a physical Wolfram Spikey Coin (not to be confused with a Wolfram Blockchain Token!) for the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Mathematica. Frederick is a long-term Mathematica user and coin collector, and together, we challenged ourselves to design our own commemorative coin for such a special event.

The iconic Spikey is a life-long companion of Mathematica, coined (no pun intended) in 1988 with the release of Version 1. Now, we’ve reached a time in which Wolfram technologies and different 3D printing processes happily marry together to make this project possible!
Shenghui Yang, Developer, Wolfram|Alpha Localization Systems
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