Thank you to all who made the Wolfram Virtual Conference Spring 2013 a great success. The free event featured two tracks of talks covering applications of Wolfram technologies in industry, education, and research as well as a Q&A with our experts and access to virtual networking. Attendees of all experience levels joined the event to gain new insights on how to get the most out of our technologies, including Mathematica's Predictive Interface, CDF and EnterpriseCDF, Wolfram SystemModeler, and more.

Next month I'm on a discussion panel at The Now and Future of Data Publishing symposium in Oxford, UK. I'm expecting this to be a good day and, if you're in the area, I recommend you think about coming along (it's free!). We're very interested in academic data. Over the past 20 years or so, publishers have changed in some big ways, such as shifting from print to online or adopting new open access business models. But one thing they haven't fully tackled yet is how to handle the increasingly large amounts of data coming out of academic research.

The Wolfram Virtual Conference Spring 2013 brings together in one event many popular topics featuring the latest in Wolfram technologies. Join us on April 16, 1–4:30pm US EDT (5–8:30pm GMT), for this free online conference that offers presentations for a wide range of interests, showing you how to get the most out of Mathematica, the Computable Document Format, Wolfram SystemModeler, and Wolfram|Alpha.

For more than two decades, Mathematica users have been using our technology to solve some of their most difficult problems. And when they find solutions, they need to communicate them to managers, colleagues, and clients. Like many other organizations, we also need to effectively communicate concepts when we design new technologies, and we need to make decisions quickly and efficiently. In the past, our own technology lacked a means of distributing results that could be viewed with a free document player, in which users could enter their own data, and that could update interactively and in real time. We made great strides in addressing all of those issues with the introduction of the Computable Document Format (CDF). CDF is a computation-powered knowledge container that supports all sorts of applications, dashboards, and reports.

Our first ever European Wolfram Technology Conference will be held June 11–12 in Frankfurt, Germany (pre-conference training on June 10 in Friedrichsdorf). Join Wolfram developers and experts as we look at how combined computation expertise across all our technologies—Wolfram|Alpha, Computable Document Format, Wolfram SystemModeler, Wolfram Workbench, and of course Mathematica—can empower you and your organization in research, development, deployment—and progress.

Last year was the 10th anniversary of the publication of A New Kind of Science and the 10th installment of the Wolfram Science Summer School (formerly the NKS Summer School). To read more about the anniversary, check out the series of blog posts by Stephen Wolfram, starting here. The Wolfram Science Summer School is a three-week research school focused on advancing student projects in the field of complex systems. Students tend to be undergraduates, graduates, post-docs, professionals, and professors. Summer school students have historically represented a wide array of topical areas, including (but not limited to): computer science, mathematics, physics, biology, ecology, architecture, music, philosophy, political science, and economics. I've been helping out with the summer school since 2008. That first year up in beautiful Burlington, Vermont, I was lucky enough to be a student while I helped coordinate the event. Since then I've published a paper based on my 2008 project, and have worked on NKS methods as applied to music, social networks, and epidemic spread.

Mathematica 9 added a slew of powerful visualization functions to its already long list of capabilities when it was released last November. To help highlight some of these and other visualization features, Wolfram Research is presenting a free virtual workshop. At the virtual workshop you can attend talks on a variety of topics, including 3D geometric modeling, data visualization, and interactive applications, and learn how to get started with your own projects. The workshop will also feature a panel discussion and Q&A sessions with Wolfram experts.