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Using Mathematica Enterprise Edition to Create Professional Apps, Tools, and Reports

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.
André Kuzniarek, Director of Document and Media Systems
Announcements & Events

Register Now for the First European Wolfram Technology Conference!

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.
Rita Crook, Marketing Projects Manager, European Sales
Computation & Analysis

Mathematica’s Role in Powering Energy Saving Solutions

Using Mathematica and other Wolfram technologies, Joseph Hirl, founder of Agilis Energy, has developed a new approach to energy analytics that is helping building owners and energy equipment suppliers around the world cut energy consumption and costs. At the core of the company's success is its Mathematica-based dynamic energy analysis application, which gives the full picture of a building's performance, measures the impact of potential operational changes, and quantifies the results. About Mathematica's role in the development of the tool and the Agilis business, Hirl says, "The flexibility of Mathematica is tremendous. Our ability to build and develop this program with a lean staff has allowed us to build out a substantial business." The application, which has now been used at more than 800 sites in at least 12 different industries, begins with data streams, including high-interval smart meter data as well as Mathematica's built-in WeatherData. It then applies sophisticated statistics and dynamic visualization functionality to generate what Hirl calls an "MRI of a building," a dynamic interface with a simulation of the building's energy use and demand and forecasting and benchmarking tools.
Wolfram Blog Team
Computation & Analysis

Behind the Scenes at the National Museum of Mathematics Meta-Logo

The National Museum of Mathematics, which opened in Manhattan in December, doesn't have a logo. It has an infinite family of logos. And the logos the museum uses for official business are not created by design professionals. They're designed by the museum's visitors. The logo is itself an exhibit in the museum. The museum's unique meta-logo was conceived and implemented at Wolfram Research. When I say "implemented," I don't mean just "calculated" or "rendered," but actually "programmed." This is a logo that requires an implementation.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Announcements & Events

Studying Wolfram Science in the Summertime

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.
Abigail Nussey, Special Projects Technical Project Manager, Special Projects
Design & Visualization

Image Effects in Mathematica

Mathematica 9 has just been released with many new or enhanced capabilities for image processing. You can perform morphological operations, color manipulation, segmentation analysis, feature detection, and more, most of which can be applied to the new Image3D object as well. A byproduct of this whole ecosystem is that now it is easier than ever to use Mathematica to create and apply effects to your images. Two Mathematica super functions that can be used to apply transformations directly to an image are ImageApply, which is a pixel operator, and ImageFilter, which considers the pixel as well as a neighborhood of pixels around it and works as a local filter. For example, you can remove the blue channel and perform a gamma correction only on the green channel by doing the following:
Giulio Alessandrini, Algorithms R&D
Announcements & Events

Explore Mathematica’s Visualization Capabilities: Free Virtual Workshop

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.
Wolfram Blog Team
Education & Academic

Announcement: Our First CBM Country

I'm very excited to announce that computerbasedmath.org has found the first country ready for our completely new kind of math education: it's Estonia. (...and here’s the press release). I thought Estonia could be first. They are very active on using technology (first to publish cabinet decisions immediately online, first to include programming in their mainstream curriculum), have ambition to improve their (already well respected) STEM aptitude and lack the dogma and resistance to change of many larger countries. There aren't so many countries with all those characteristics. In our first Estonia project we will work with them to rewrite key years of school probability and statistics from scratch. This is an area that's just crazy to do without a computer, even harmful. It's an area that's only come to the fore since computers because it only makes sense with lots of data. No-one in real life does these hand analyses or works with only 5 data points, so why do we make our students? Why get students emulating what computers do so much better (computing) rather than concentrate on imaginative thinking, analysis and problem-solving that students ought to be able to do so much better even than today's computers?
Conrad Wolfram
Education & Academic

Centennial of Markov Chains

On January 23, 1913 of the Julian calendar, Andrey A. Markov presented for the Royal Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg his analysis of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. He found that the sequence of consonants and vowels in the text could be well described as a random sequence, where the likely category of a letter depended only on the category of the previous or previous two letters. At the time, the Russian Empire was using the Julian calendar. The 100th anniversary of the celebrated presentation is actually February 5, 2013, in the now used Gregorian calendar. To perform his analysis, Markov invented what are now known as "Markov chains," which can be represented as probabilistic state diagrams where the transitions between states are labeled with the probabilities of their occurrences.
Oleksandr Pavlyk, Senior Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
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