Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Wolfram Innovator Award

Wolfram technologies have long been a major force in many areas of industry and research. Leaders in many top organizations and institutions have played a major role in using computational intelligence and pushing the boundaries of how the Wolfram technology stack is leveraged for innovation across fields and disciplines.

We recognize these deserving recipients with the Wolfram Innovator Award, which is awarded at the Wolfram Technology Conferences around the world.

2022

William A. Sethares

Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Areas: Computational Humanities, Computational Thinking, Computer-Aided Education, Courseware Development, Engineering, Image and Signal Processing, Image Processing, Signal Processing

Bill Sethares is a researcher and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, focusing on signal processing with applications in acoustics, image processing, communications and optimization.

At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Sethares attracts students from majors beyond engineering with his computationally rich image processing course material and project-based learning (all Wolfram Language–based, of course!). Sethares is a founding member of the LEOcode project and brings computation to art historians in the form of applications used to find patterns in watermarks and canvases. These can help to identify and date historical papers and paintings.

2018

Aaron Santos

Data Scientist, EMC Insurance

Areas: Authoring and Publishing, Computational Physics, Data Science, Industrial Engineering, Internet of Things, Nanotechnology, Risk Analysis

Dr. Santos is a data scientist, professor and author who uses Wolfram technology to advance data and device integration in a variety of sectors. He and his team at EMC Insurance have used the Wolfram Language and Wolfram Enterprise Private Cloud for valuable research analyzing data from IoT devices to help improve driver safety, reduce fuel consumption and identify worksite hazards. As part of a recent startup, Dr. Santos also worked on the development of a nanotechnology device for efficiently identifying the genetic makeup of food products, with future plans to integrate Wolfram Cloud technology to provide additional analytics and services to consumers.

2018

Abby Brown

Teacher of Mathematics, Torrey Pines High School (Department of Math)

Areas: Authoring and Publishing, Calculus, Computational Thinking, Education, Mathematics Courseware Design

Abby Brown is a teacher at Torrey Pines High School. Over the last decade, she has used Wolfram technologies to develop and publish interactive course materials for high-school and junior-high mathematics. In addition to evangelizing the Wolfram Language to colleagues and students, Abby actively shares her course materials through a variety of websites. She has made numerous contributions to Computational Thinking Initiatives and has started the Computational Thinking Club at her school. Many of Abby’s former students go on to use the Wolfram Language for hackathons and university work.

2020

Dr. Ambar Jain

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal

Areas: Education, Mathematics, Mathematics Courseware Design

Ambar Jain is a professor, researcher and developer who uses Mathematica and the Wolfram Language in all spheres of his profession. In 2015, he founded the Center for Research in Advanced Technologies for Education in Science, where he developed Examineer, an assessment engine for educators by educators. Examineer uses the Wolfram Language in the backend for authoring e-learning and assessment content and delivering them in the form of quizzes. He has also co-created a course for physics undergraduates titled Physics through Computational Thinking that uses Mathematica for teaching computational thinking using examples from physics. Many of his students use the Wolfram Cloud for performing physics computations. He is also engaged in several research projects where he uses the Wolfram Language for symbolic calculations, numeric computations and machine learning.

2015

André Koppel

CEO, André Koppel Software GmbH

Areas: C, Data Analysis, Embedded Systems, Financial Analysis, Insolvency Analysis, Programming, QNX, Software Development, Visualization

André Koppel has worked in the field of measurement systems for over thirty years, developing robust software for intensive use in a wide variety of fields. His most recent project is the development of a modular software system for insolvency management, called INVEP, which uses the Wolfram Language to power its analytical engine. INVEP is capable of processing and analyzing accounts with more than 100,000 entries within seconds. He also teaches a course in insolvency analysis, using Wolfram Mathematica, at the University of Applied Sciences Schmalkalden.

2017

Andrew Yule

Flow Assurance Specialist, Assured Flow Solutions

Areas: Authoring and Publishing, Chemical Engineering, Data Analytics, Fluid Dynamics

Andrew Yule is a flow assurance specialist at Assured Flow Solutions who developed an internal toolkit written entirely using the Wolfram Language and deployed it to his colleagues through EnterpriseCDF. Containing over 40 different calculations and workflows that are used daily throughout the company, this toolkit centralized Assured Flow Solutions utilities and has completely changed the way the entire organization views data analytics and visualizations. He also uses the Wolfram Cloud to deploy APIs that run calculations as a back end to Visual Basic UIs.

2020

Ariel Sepúlveda

Pronto Analytics Inc.

Areas: Business Analysis, Image Processing, Industrial Engineering, Software Development

Ariel Sepúlveda is the founder and president of Pronto Analytics, an organization dedicated to helping other organizations standardize the generation of analyses and reports for supporting decision-making processes. He is an industrial engineer who has used Wolfram technology throughout his educational and professional career. He has used the Wolfram Language in many fields, including quality control, retail analytics, image processing and manufacturing applications. Ariel’s most recent project is D4CR, a Wolfram Language–powered application that interprets natural language queries to analyze data and generate standardized reports.

2013

Bart ter Haar Romeny

Eindhoven University of Technology

Areas: Biotechnology, Image Processing, Mathematics

A professor in biomedical image analysis, Bart ter Haar Romeny uses Mathematica to design brain-inspired image analysis methods for computer-aided diagnosis. He is an enthusiastic teacher, and introduced Mathematica as a design tool in the curriculum for all students of his department and in most projects in his group. He advocates that Mathematica is ideal for designing innovative algorithms and for “playing with the math.” His PhD students van Almsick, Duits, Franken, (now Professor) Florack, Janssen, and Bekkers substantially contributed to the Mathematica packages on brain-inspired computing. He cochaired with Markus van Almsick the International Mathematica Symposium 2008 in Maastricht and teaches a popular national course on biologically inspired computing (book written in Mathematica), which was thrice awarded the BME Teaching Award.

2021

Bill Gosper

Mathematician and Programmer

Areas: Computer Science, Education, Software Development

Bill Gosper was part of the group at MIT that produced HAKMEM, also known as AI Memo 239, a large collection of computer and mathematical hacks, some of which are now quite famous. Stephen Wolfram refers to Bill as “Ramanujan-like” for his prolific production of mathematical results. Bill has invented several algorithms for symbolic computation, including ones for symbolic summation and continued fractions. In more recent times, Bill has been working with the next generation of amazingly bright students, producing remarkable and very surprising research results.

2020

Branden Fitelson

Northeastern University

Areas: Computational Humanities, Education, Philosophy, Probability Theory, Software Development

Branden Fitelson is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Northeastern University, where he teaches logic and formal epistemology courses using Mathematica. He developed the PrSAT package (a user-friendly decision procedure for probability calculus), which is used by various researchers and teachers around the world. Branden has used Mathematica for computational research in philosophy since the early 1990s, and he consistently encourages and inspires others to do the same.

2013

Brian Frezza & Emerald Therapeutics

Co-CEO and Co-founder, Emerald Therapeutics

Areas: Biotechnology

Brian Frezza, Co-CEO and Co-founder of Emerald Therapeutics, has integrated Mathematica at many organizational levels within the company—from using it as a standard documentation tool for the Emerald Therapeutics computer platform to controlling laboratory robots. Although the business is small, Mathematica has been broadly integrated in a manner rarely seen, even by Mathematica’s power users. Emerald’s small team has used Mathematica to conduct more than half a million biotech experiments.

2016

Brian Kanze

Georgia-Pacific

Areas: Data Analysis, Data Science, Research and Analysis

As data scientist and concept design leader at Georgia-Pacific, Brian Kanze uses Wolfram technologies to bring innovation to Georgia-Pacific’s consumer products division. He developed a large-scale analysis and reporting tool to assist building owners and managers in forecasting product usage, reporting availability and planning work shifts according to peak usage times. Georgia-Pacific is pioneering new software-based analytic services using Wolfram Language-based technology, and Kanze’s work has identified key areas where this technology can be used to enhance performance and analysis.

2018

Bruce Colletti

Operations Researcher, Cox Automotive Inc
Adjunct Professor, Northern Virginia Community College

Areas: Authoring and Publishing, Defense Analysis, Education, Industrial Engineering, Mathematics, Operations Research, System Modeling

Dr. Colletti is an operations researcher and former Air Force major who has used Wolfram technologies extensively for research in defense and homeland security analysis. He used Mathematica to finish his dissertation on group theory, as well as for a number of subsequent publications over the following two decades. Consulting for many classified government projects, he utilizes the Wolfram Language and Wolfram SystemModeler to develop large-scale analytic models for personnel, logistics and program evaluation. Dr. Colletti has guided the research of eight master’s and doctoral students at several universities, and he has won awards for his work instructing mathematics courses with the Wolfram Language at Northern Virginia Community College.

2014

Bruce Torrence

Randolph-Macon College

Areas: Authoring and Publishing, Authoring in Mathematica, Computer Graphics and Visual Arts, Computer-Aided Education, Education, Mathematics

Bruce Torrence is the author of numerous Mathematica books and articles including The Student’s Introduction to Mathematica, a popular general reference book for students and educators. In addition to publishing dozens of articles on the use of Mathematica in education and research, Torrence recently completed a five-year editorship at Math Horizons and is a Wolfram Science Summer School alumni.

2021

Bruno Autin

President, Les Trois Platanes

Areas: Authoring and Publishing, Computational Physics, Physics, Software Development

Bruno Autin started his professional life in the Laboratoire de Recherches Générales de la Compagnie Française Thomson Houston, where he studied the amplification of acoustic microwaves in cadmium sulfide. He strove to replace classical traveling wave tubes by tiny crystals, the scaling factor being the ratio between sound and light velocities. In 1967, he began working at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), where his research turned quickly towards subnuclear physics with the development of very-high-energy accelerators. Bruno started with the first proton collider, the Intersection Storage Rings (ISR), and became introduced to the design and operation of the magnetic systems of accelerators and colliders. The basic theory had been established by Ernest Courant, but matching the architecture of colliders to particle detectors was largely a process of trial and error depending on numerical computations. Finding this to be unsatisfactory, he started testing symbolic languages. The first achievement was the shape of the CERN antiproton source calculated with Veltman’s Schoonschip. The saga of the antiprotons continued both at CERN and at Fermilab. Then, during a sabbatical year at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he worked on the design of the Advanced Synchrotron Light Source, he tested the first release of Mathematica, which was packed with the NeXT computer. Having symbolics, numerics, graphics and the notebook interface convinced him to build two packages: Geometrica for geometry and BeamOptics for the investigation of optical systems adapted to projects such as beam emittance optimization for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), muon colliders, neutrino factories and medical synchrotrons. Now retired from CERN, he follows the progress of particle physics and writes particle accelerator documentation for Wolfram Research.

2021

Bruno Buchberger

Professor Emeritus, Johannes Kepler University Linz

Areas: Education, Mathematics, Mathematics Courseware Design, Software Development

Bruno Buchburger is a professor of computer mathematics at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. He is internationally known for his algorithmic theory of Gröbner bases. In recent years, Buchberger established the automated reasoning system Theorema and implemented it with his coworkers and students within Mathematica. Buchberger also contributed to the development of symbolic computation and computer algebra by founding and building up the Journal of Symbolic Computation, the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation (RISC), the Softwarepark Hagenberg and the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria.

2016

Bryan Minor

Acquisio

Areas: Advertising, Data Analysis, Research and Analysis

Bryan Minor leads algorithm development and associated intellectual property development as chief scientist at Acquisio in Montreal, Canada. He has developed Bid & Budget Management, a suite of fully automated algorithms for optimizing pay-per-click advertising across publishers, including Google, AdWords, Bing and Yahoo! Japan. Minor uses Mathematica and the Wolfram Language for research and data analysis, with algorithm implementation being focused on the API micro-service architecture of Wolfram Enterprise Private Cloud.

2021

Dr. Carol Johnstone

Senior Scientist, Particle Accelerator Corporation

Areas: Applied Mathematics, Biomedical Research, Computational Physics, Computer Science, Data Science, Mathematical Biology, Optimization, Physics

Dr. Johnstone is an internationally recognized senior accelerator physicist at Fermilab and Particle Accelerator Corporation. Her work was initially created to solve a simple set of approximate, thin lens optics equations simultaneously with geometric orbit equations. These constraint equations provided physical and field parameters that insured stable machine performance in novel accelerators for high energy physics research, such as the muon collider or Neutrino Factory. Her work evolved into a powerful new methodology for advanced accelerator design and optimization, which has since been applied to innovations in accelerators for radioisotope production, cancer therapy, security and cargo scanning, radiopharmaceuticals and green energy production. Dr. Johnstone’s efforts have resulted in the creation of a now-patented design for a non-scaling fixed-field gradient accelerator. Her work has also helped lead to the now-under-construction National Center for Particle Beam Therapy and Research in Texas, which will be the most advanced cancer therapy center in the US.

2019

Casey B. Mulligan

Professor of Economics, Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago

Areas: Computational Humanities, Economic Research and Analysis, Economics, Software Development

Casey Mulligan is a renowned economist who has served as chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisors, a visiting professor at several universities and a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. He frequently uses the Wolfram Language in his economic research and has published numerous papers that utilize Mathematica computations and visualizations. Mulligan has additionally developed a Wolfram Language package that provides unique functionality for automated economic reasoning using both quantitative and qualitative assumptions.

2014

Chad Slaughter

Enova Financial

Areas: Actuarial Sciences, Data Mining and Analysis, Economics, Finance, Financial Risk, Risk, Risk Analysis

At Enova Financial, Chad Slaughter used Mathematica’s deep analysis capabilities to better understand the relationship between performance data and top-level business metrics. This led to the Colossus Project, a completely automated platform that handles Enova’s online loan approval system and can process more than 20,000 loans per hour. Now a consultant, Slaughter is also using Wolfram Development Platform (formerly Wolfram Programming Cloud) to create solutions for Eligo Energy.

2013

Charles Macal

Director, Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation, Argonne National Laboratory

Areas: Engineering, System Modeling

As Director of the Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation at Argonne National Lab, Charles Macal uses Mathematica to develop models for studying behavioral factors that contribute to the spread of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and to study how human reactions to political and military action can be quantified and used to simulate when and if conflicts will arise. Macal has been asked to work with the Federal Highway Administration on an innovative new project to develop models for understanding driver behavior for route planning and improving vehicular safety.

2019

Chris Hanusa

Associate Professor of Mathematics, PhD, CUNY Queens College

Areas: 3D Printing, Computer Graphics and Visual Arts, Mathematics, Mathematics Courseware Design

Chris Hanusa is a professor at Queens College in Queens, New York, teaching classes on calculus, mathematical modeling, graph theory and more. He makes extensive use of Mathematica to help his students with complex calculations and for visualizing difficult concepts. In his Math with Mathematica course, Hanusa works with students on several Mathematica-based projects, including 3D modeling and printing. He gives regular talks on teaching with Mathematica, emphasizing the importance of the Wolfram Language’s 3D printing capabilities.

2017

Chris Reed

Aerospace Corporation

Areas: Aerospace, Applied Mathematics, Authoring and Publishing, Physics

Dr. Reed is an applied mathematician at Aerospace Corporation who uses Mathematica to identify and create various aerospace solutions specific to rocket and satellite design and testing. A certified instructor at Aerospace Corp., he has introduced many colleagues to Wolfram technologies through his classes, where it has become a staple for experimentation. Dr. Reed has two approved patents that involve solving nonlinear boundary-value problems and rely on the Wolfram Language’s modeling and visualization capabilities.

2012

W. Craig Carter

Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT

Areas: Computer Graphics and Visual Arts, Control Engineering, Materials Science

W. Craig Carter is recognized for his many uses of Mathematica over the years, starting with his PhD studies. He has tutored other MIT faculty with course examples in Mathematica to help their work, from the project planning stage forward. Craig has also used Mathematica for many years in his course “Mathematics for Materials Science and Engineers.” Craig’s achievements using Mathematica in his research include prototyping an idea with a start-up company to create a new type of battery. He also used Wolfram technology to collaborate on and help design an art piece feature at the Pompidou in Paris.

See W. Craig Carter's Mathematica Demonstrations »

2011

Dana Scott

Carnegie Mellon University

Areas: Computer Science, Mathematics

Dana Scott was an early user of Wolfram technologies in teaching, including developing a Mathematica-based course in projective geometry. The co-inventor of nondeterministic finite automata, winner of the 1976 ACM Turing Award, and founder of domain theory, he continues to employ new Mathematica functionality in innovative ways, for example by using SatisfiabilityInstances to find tilings of pentominoes.

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