[Colloquium] TODAY, Wolfram Research Talk By Michael Trott

[Rafael Turner]

Hi everyone,

Today, the ACM is hosting Senior Researcher Michael
Trott. His work includes R&D for Wolfram Alpha and lead developer of
the Wolfram Functions Site. He is also the author of the Mathematica
GuideBooks, a four-volume exploration of Mathematica's application to
classic and current problems in science, computer science, and
visualization.  If you plan to attend, please RSVP here: http://goo.gl/2QYXj

WHEN: Today, Thursday, April 19 @ 4:30pm

WHERE: Ryerson 255 (the CS lounge)

SUMMARY:
Suppose you want to watch the Final Four on the brightest HDTV
possible. In what unit would you measure brightness? Answering
quantitative questions such as "brightest HDTV" is Wolfram|Alpha's
specialty. Accessible at www.wolframalpha.com, Wolfram|Alpha is a
computational knowledge engine based on three things: 1) understanding
user queries posed in natural language, 2) immense and varied datasets
(ranging from historic weather, atomic spectral lines, and functional
equations of the Riemann zeta function) and 3) automated analyses of
the datasets, based on Mathematica. This talk explains how we process
and prepare a variety of data and discusses the importance of units
and measures for this task. The talk also covers how
mathematical/formulaic data from Wolfram|Alpha extend the
computational capabilities of Mathematica.