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Design & Visualization

New in the Wolfram Language: ColorBalance

I've taken pictures numerous times, either with a camera or with my phone, only to find out that the colors were completely off—they had bluish, reddish, or even greenish tints. Before I started working on image and color processing, this was quite mysterious to me. Moreover, I'd always noticed on my cameras a white balance setting that, when played with, produced results very much like my skewed-color photographs. Could it be these two were related? That camera setting is indeed the key to correcting a color cast, and it has been added to the Wolfram Language with the ColorBalance function. Here is a simple example of how it works:
Giulio Alessandrini, Algorithms R&D
Announcements & Events

Wolfram Technology Conference 2015: Pushing the Boundaries of Computation

The Wolfram Technology Conference 2015 is just a few weeks away, and we're excited to demonstrate the latest in cloud computing, interactive deployment, mobile devices, and more as we explore how Wolfram technologies are pushing the boundaries of computation. If you haven't already reserved your spot for this year's conference, there's still time to register. As the conference draws closer, we're putting finishing touches on the event schedule, which will include in-depth presentations, hands-on workshops, "Meet-Ups" for attendees with similar interests, recognition of 2015 Wolfram Innovator Award winners, and lots of networking opportunities. Here are some of the topics we'll be highlighting October 20–22:
Emily Suess, Technical Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Products

Releasing the OPCClassic Library

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Wouldn't it be great if you could easily connect your simulation models to your existing infrastructure? Whether you are working in industries such as oil and gas, industrial energy, or life sciences, connecting to your processes in order to monitor and control them is vital. The OPC (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control) standard has been developed by industry and the OPC Foundation just for that purpose. OPC is a set of data transfer standards for multi-vendor, multi-platform, secure, and reliable interoperability in industrial automation:
Patrik Ekenberg, Applications Engineer, Wolfram MathCore
Education & Academic

Help Fix Maths Education at the Computer-Based Maths Education Summit

When was the last time you had to solve a quadratic equation by hand? If, like me, you haven't needed that particular skill since high school, then you've probably wondered what all that fuss was about! And it's a good question: why did we spend so much time on those puzzling, formulaic second-degree beasts, using up pencils and erasers like they were going out of fashion, just to find the value of x? The truth is, in the real, working world of 2015, the value of that pesky x will invariably be found by a computer. The sooner education acknowledges this fact, the better. So says Conrad Wolfram, whose Computer-Based Maths (CBM) initiative is using Wolfram technologies to bring computers and coding into mainstream maths curricula around the world.
Richard Asher, Public Relations
Education & Academic

Summer Schools: Wolfram Science and Wolfram Innovation

For three weeks this past July, Wolfram held the annual Wolfram Summer School for over 60 students from around the world. They came to work on projects ranging from aperiodic hexagonal tessellations to computer language grammars to political sentiment microsites. The overarching theme was entrepreneurial science. Participants employed cutting-edge computational tools like Wolfram Programming Cloud, machine learning, and a whole variety of new functions from Version 10.2 of the Wolfram Language.
Todd Rowland, Academic Director, Wolfram Science and Innovation Initiatives
Computation & Analysis

The Winner of the GOP Presidential Debate

A few days ago, Fox News hosted the first presidential primary debate of 2016. The candidates met onstage, vying for support from the GOP electorate. Among the cacophony and crafty messaging, a truly artful winner has emerged: word clouds. The WordCloud function (1 of 5000+ functions) in the Wolfram Language allows anyone to visualize words, sized by their frequency in a text. With a mere line of code, you can create a compelling word cloud graphic from data, text, or URLs. But don't take my word for it; let's make the WordCloud function earn your support.
Jonathan Wallace, Marketing Communications Manager
Leading Edge

New in the Wolfram Language: TextCases

The Wolfram Language has had extensive support for string manipulation since Mathematica 5, and in Version 10 it provided uniform symbolic access to a huge repository of computable data via the Wolfram Knowledgebase. Taking advantage of both of these fundamental capabilities, along with new machine learning functionality with Classify and Predict, we're excited to be making further inroads into the rich domains of natural language processing and text analytics with TextCases, new in Version 10.2. TextCases, like its sister functions Cases and StringCases, finds instances of patterns in a given input. Whereas Cases operates on Wolfram Language expressions and StringCases on strings, TextCases assumes that the input is human understandable text, from which one can extract known syntactic and semantic entities. These include basic textual types such as words, sentences, and paragraphs, but also more sophisticated semantic types such as countries, cities, and numbers. As a simple example, let's use TextCases to find instances of countries in a sentence:
Gopal Sarma, Senior NLP Research Programmer, Advanced Research Group
Education & Academic

2015 Wolfram Summer Camps Exceed Expectations

We say it every year, because it is true, but once again this year's Wolfram Summer Camps were the most successful yet. Thirty-eight students from seven different countries attended our camps at Bentley University this July. Students came to camp with some prior programming experience, but most had little or no familiarity with the Wolfram Language. In nine short days, however, they were able to produce amazing results.
Adriana Rose, Business Development, Partnerships
Products

Over the Moon for Guinness World Records’ Diamond Anniversary

For the record, let's start here. Next month, Guinness World Records will officially celebrate its 60th anniversary as the leading authority on "record-breaking achievement." A long-cherished favorite for holiday gifting and the coffee table, Guinness World Records not only provides a unique collection of knowledge but also encourages people to challenge the application of those facts. That's not limited to the public, either; GWR itself holds the record for best-selling annual publication, a record set in 2013 that has yet to be overthrown.
Jenna Giuffrida, Content Administrator, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
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