From: JeanieSubject: Fwd: Stephen Wolfram to answer WolframAlpha questions in live webcast
Date: 3 Jun 2009
To: Paraprofessional crowd @ Any Library, Any Town, Any State 12345 USA
Hi, ya'll:
At first I was just going to send this to one of my colleagues, Linda, because I figured our resident tech guru would be interested in the webcast.
Then I thought you all who are not already tracking this might also want to follow the development of WolframAlpha.
Then I decided not to send it to anyone at all because a super griped about me having sent you all a 2MB file on my one true love, our Local Music collection.
She thought it was more information than a paraprofessional needed.
I do not subscribe to that belief. I'm all about sharing the wealth, so I am posting WolframAlpha info here and will send you all the link to this post.
How can a super complain about me sending a link?
Uh-huh. Likewise here.
I was thinking of not even sharing the link to this post until we went to that staff day workshop on Google. I thought everyone knew about the define feature and all that.
So many paraprofessionals learned something from that workshop -- how can I not share WolframAlpha?
I've been interested in WolframAlpha since I read ...
"New Search Tool Aims at Answering Tough Queries, but Not at Taking on Google"
... in the May 10, 2009, edition of The New York Times.
Says The Times writer: "The goal of creating a computer system that can answer questions has been a tantalizing but elusive pursuit for many computer scientists for more than four decades. Some veterans of the field say Mr. Wolfram may have come as close as anyone yet."
If you have not been tuned in, the skinny on WolframAlpha is that it will not "rival" Google -- it is not a search engine per se -- but will answer questions -- this from The New York Times -- "often by doing complex and new computations. WolframAlpha wants to 'make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything."
Here's more on WolframAlpha from one of The New York Times technology blogs:
Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine.
In a talk at Harvard Law School, Stephen Wolfram, a well-known mathematician, scientist and entrepreneur, gave a demonstration of his soon-to-be released Web service which promises to answer all sorts of questions. The service, called Wolfram Alpha, had technology bloggers abuzz that a rival to Google was about to hit the Web.
While search engines like Google, by and large, find things that already exist on the Internet — Web sites, photos, videos, blogs — Wolfram Alpha answers questions, often by doing complex, and new computations.
It’s hard to judge a product from a demo, but by the looks of it, Wolfram Alpha is impressive.
And this from the WolframAlpha site: "Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."
And even more on WolframAlpha from their website is below, but check it out yourself, especially the Visual Gallery of Examples. It is really amazing and will truly be a "household term" in the same way that Google is.
About WolframAlpha Goals
WolframAlpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
WolframAlpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.
WolframAlpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.
Status
That it should be possible to build WolframAlpha as it exists today in the first decade of the 21st century was far from obvious. And yet there is much more to come.
As of now, WolframAlpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—WolframAlpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, WolframAlpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.
WolframAlpha's knowledge base and capabilities already span a great many domains, and its underlying framework has the power and flexibility to support ready extension to essentially any domain that is based on systematic knowledge. …
The universe of potentially computable knowledge is, however, almost endless, and in creating WolframAlpha as it is today, we needed to start somewhere. Our approach so far has been to emphasize domains where computation has traditionally had a more significant role. As we have developed WolframAlpha, we have in effect been systematically covering the content areas of reference libraries and handbooks. In going forward, we plan broader and deeper coverage, both of traditionally scientific, technical, economic, and otherwise quantitative knowledge, and of more everyday, popular, and cultural knowledge.
WolframAlpha's ability to understand free-form input is based on algorithms that are informed by our analysis of linguistic usage in large volumes of material on the web and elsewhere. As the usage of WolframAlpha grows, we will capture a whole new level of linguistic data, which will allow us to greatly enhance WolframAlpha's linguistic capabilities.
Today's WolframAlpha is just the beginning. We have ambitious plans, for data, for computation, for linguistics, for presentation, and more. As we go forward, we'll be discussing what we're doing on the WolframAlpha Blog, and we encourage suggestions and participation, especially through the WolframAlpha Community.
Thanks from Jeanie
"Never accept images that have been created for you by someone else." -- Malcolm X
________________________________________
--- the forwarded message follows ---
From: WolframAlpha Team
Sender: WolframAlpha Team
Subject: Stephen Wolfram to answer WolframAlpha questions in live webcast
Date: 3 June 2009
To: (Jeanie)
Our team is hard at work going through the tens of thousands of comments, suggestions, and questions coming in about WolframAlpha.
We thought you'd enjoy hearing Stephen Wolfram respond to some of this feedback directly.
We invite you to join us for a live webcast on Thursday, June 4, at 4pm U.S. CDT (GMT -5 hours), as Stephen responds to some of the questions you've sent in.
Details about the live webcast and how you can participate are available in today's WolframAlpha blog post:
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/06/02/stephen-wolfram-to-answer-wolframalpha-questions-in-live-webcast/
Best regards,
The WolframAlpha Team
http://www.wolframalpha.com
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