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Computation & Analysis

Edit Your NaNoWriMo Novel with the Wolfram Language

If you're like many of us at Wolfram, you probably know that November was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Maybe you even spent the past few weeks feverishly writing, pounding out that coming-of-age story about a lonely space dragon that you've been talking about for years. Congratulations! Now what? Revisions, of course! And we, the kindly Wolfram Blog Team, are here to get you through your revisions with a little help from the Wolfram Language.
Zach Littrell, Technical Content Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group John Moore, Marketing and Technical Content Team Lead, Technical Communications & Strategy Group
Computation & Analysis

New in the Wolfram Language: FeatureExtraction

Two years ago, we introduced the first high-level machine learning functions of the Wolfram Language, Classify and Predict. Since then, we have been creating a set of automatic machine learning functionalities (ClusterClassify, DimensionReduction, etc.). Today, I am happy to present a new function called FeatureExtraction that deals with another important machine learning task: extracting features from data. Unlike Classify and Predict, which follow the supervised learning paradigm, FeatureExtraction belongs to the unsupervised learning paradigm, meaning that the data to learn from is given as a set of unlabeled examples (i.e. without an input -> output relation). The main goal of FeatureExtraction is to transform these examples into numeric vectors (often called feature vectors). For example, let's apply FeatureExtraction to a simple dataset:
Etienne Bernard, Lead Architect, Machine Learning
Current Events & History

Celebrating Gottfried Leibniz on the 300th Anniversary of His Death

Today is the 300th anniversary of the death of Gottfried Leibniz, a man whose work has had a deep influence on what we do here at Wolfram Research. He was born July 1, 1646, in Leipzig, and died November 14, 1716, in Hanover, which was, at the time, part of the Holy Roman Empire. I associate his name most strongly with my time learning calculus, which he invented in parallel with Isaac Newton. But Leibniz was a polymath, and his ideas and influence were much broader than that. He invented binary numbers, the integral sign and an early form of mechanical calculator.
Kathryn Cramer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Announcements & Events

The 2016 Wolfram One-Liner Competition Winners

Could you fit the code for a fully functional game of Pong into a single tweet? One that gives you more points the more you take your chances in letting the "ball" escape? Philip Maymin did, and took first prize with that submission in the One-Liner Competition held at this year's Wolfram Technology Conference. Participants in the competition submit 128 or fewer tweetable characters of Wolfram Language code to perform the most impressive computation they can dream up. We had a bumper crop of entries this year that showed the surprising power of the Wolfram Language. You might think that after decades of experience creating and developing with the Wolfram Language, we at Wolfram Research would have seen and thought of it all. But every year our conference attendees surprise us. Read on to see the amazing effects you can achieve with a tweet of Wolfram Language code.

Honorable Mention

Amy Friedman: "The Song Titles" (110 characters)

Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Education & Academic

My Wolfram Tech Conference 2016 Highlights

Here are just a handful of things I heard while attending my first Wolfram Technology Conference: "We had a nearly 4-billion-time speedup on this code example." "We've worked together for over 9 years, and now we're finally meeting!" "Coding in the Wolfram Language is like collaborating with 200 or 300 experts." "You can turn financial data into rap music. Instead, how about we turn rap music into financial data?" As a first-timer from the Wolfram Blog Team attending the Technology Conference, I wanted to share with you some of the highlights for me---making new friends, watching Wolfram Language experts code and seeing what the Wolfram family has been up to around the world this past year.
Zach Littrell, Technical Content Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Leading Edge

Less Than Five Lines of Code

Software engineer and longtime Mathematica user Chad Slaughter uses the Wolfram Language to facilitate interdepartmental communication during software development. While most programming languages are designed to do one thing particularly well, developers like Slaughter often find that the Wolfram Language is more versatile: "With traditional C++, in order to develop a program, it's going to take several hundred lines of code to do anything interesting. With Mathematica, I can do something interesting in less than five lines of code."
John Moore, Marketing and Technical Content Team Lead, Technical Communications & Strategy Group
Education & Academic

New in the Wolfram Language: Ask

Making web forms should be dead simple. That has been one of our goals at Wolfram Research since the release of the Wolfram Cloud. We've made smart input fields, powered by Wolfram|Alpha technology, that understand almost anything users type. We've designed FormFunction and APIFunction so that you can build forms and APIs with the same readable syntax. And now with the newest version of the Wolfram Language, you can build interactive web forms with dynamic branching and control flow using the Ask family of functions.

Carlo Barbieri, Applied Research Group
Education & Academic

How to Teach Computational Thinking

The Computational Future Computational thinking is going to be a defining feature of the future—and it’s an incredibly important thing to be teaching to kids today. There’s always lots of discussion (and concern) about how to teach traditional mathematical thinking to kids. But looking to the future, this pales in comparison to the importance of […]

Stephen Wolfram
Education & Academic

New Wolfram Language Books

We are constantly surprised by what fascinating applications and topics Wolfram Language experts are writing about, and we're happy to again share with you some of these amazing authors' works. With topics ranging from learning to use the Wolfram Language on a Raspberry Pi to a groundbreaking book with a novel approach to calculations, you are bound to find a publication perfect for your interests.
Zach Littrell, Technical Content Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
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