Wolfram Summer School: Member Story



    Wolfram Summer School Website

    Wolfram Research conducts a summer school for everyone from around the world every summer. Within the school, each participant gets the opportunity to learn the Wolfram Language and implement their own project, which will be personally supervised by Stephen Wolfram and the Wolfram Research team of experts.

    Last 2015, Anna Kudryashova (IT analyst, kudryashova.info ) visited Wolfram Summer School . You can read her story about this below.

    The company Wolfram Research led by Stephen Wolfram conducts various educational programs for pupils, students, scientists and businessmen. In this article, I would like to talk about an event that took place in the summer of 2015 and in which I was lucky to participate.

    WOLFRAM SUMMER SCHOOL 2015


    Within the framework of the Summer School program (Wolfram Summer School), there are two areas: Science and Innovation .

    Science ( Science ) School held since 2003 for students and have practitioners from various fields. The school aims to show how Wolfram Research software can help further research. In addition to the scientific school in 2015, an experiment was conducted and created a school of Innovation ( Innovation ), in which students were asked to create a small website, using the Wolfram system means, that is, the students had to create a complete application for a wide range of consumers.

    In the following description, I do not share schools, since the predominant part of training is designed for students of both directions, and organizational processes are completely identical.

    How to get?

    1. Application


    You must fill out the form on the summer projects page. You can get acquainted with summer schools here and here you can expect the opening of registration for programs .

    The form fills in the basic information (full name, university, specialty, work), the sphere of professional interests and other data. It is also necessary to indicate the most liked part of A New Kind of Science ( NKS ) and the ideas that you got from there.

    2. Interview


    Next, you need time to consider your application by the commission. In my case, the answer came two days later . If what you described in the application corresponds to the ideas of the employees about future students, then you will be assigned an interview in person or via video.

    The interview is conducted in English and touches on various aspects: education, professional interests, level of programming skills, educational and work projects, knowledge of Wolfram software, knowledge of NKS and the theory of cellular automata. But the main issue, and in my opinion, the decisive one was the existence of an idea that can be implemented in the framework of the summer school project.

    In my case, the interview took place personally in Moscow, it took aboutan hour and a half where we talked on the above topics. Probably the most difficult thing for me was to name the topics of possible projects for the Summer School and the explanation of what cellular automata are.

    3. Invitation


    After making a positive decision about your candidacy, you will be sent an official invitation , some clarifying information and given some time to consider the answer. After your consent, a questionnaire is sent to you, in which you fill out various data on accommodation, meals, etc. Then you only need to pay for accommodation and meals (if you chose accommodation and meals on campus) and get ready for school! HURRAH!

    4. Arrival


    In my case, the invitation came a few days after the interview, I paid for accommodation and tickets, and three weeks later I was in Massachusetts with other students at the school. People gathered here from all over the globe , starting from Brazil and ending with Australia, having a secondary to doctoral degree.

    Where did the training take place?


    Bentley University Bentley University
    , Waltham, Massachusetts.

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    The main building is the

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    Symbol of the University

    Students were supposed to arrive at the University of Bentley , Massachusetts , where they went through the registration procedure, agreed on a few days in June .

    Many students have chosen dormitories for their stay as the cheapest and most convenient option. The convenience of such accommodation was in proximity to the location of the classes.

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    Dormitory

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    Lock on the door to the dorm room

    How was your training?


    Training


    For training, students needed to install Mathematica on a computer in advance , a product license was granted, if necessary.

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    My set for training

    As I said, there are two areas of the school starting in 2015: Innovation and Science , and students had to choose the most suitable direction for them . However, undecided students, like me, were able to move from one school to another when they knew exactly what project they wanted to implement.

    Also, in my opinion, it is very useful to think about a future project before starting school .

    Training mode


    The training took place 5 days a week from morning to evening, and time was also allocated for self-training. All communications took place by mail , and the schedule, current activities and the necessary information could be viewed in the Wolfram cloud . A significant part of the lectures was held in both schools together, and attendance at the lectures of another school was not forbidden.

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    Lecture

    Subject Lecture


    The lectures were very different, there were both learning the basics of programming in the Wolfram Mathematica system, and Stephen's stories about his company and about strategies for creating a business in general.

    A significant part of the lectures was directed at the NKS theory .

    However, in my opinion, the main idea of ​​training was aimed at showing the limitless possibilities of the Wolfram system to help students realize their ideas . For example, topics such as machine learning, image manipulation, Arduino programming, etc.

    Project


    Depending on their specialization and interests, each student was assigned a mentor who was supposed to help all his students. Having talked with the mentor, the students had to decide on a rough project within the first week, after which each of the students had a personal meeting with Stephen Wolfram so that he recognized you, your professional ones were interesting, helped with the theme and implementation of the project, and also gave valuable ideas and shared his thoughts. After defining the project , it was proposed to complete it in two weeks , after which a presentation took place.

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    Mentor helps with code before presentation

    Working atmosphere


    The atmosphere was just amazing. People worked everywhere: in classrooms, cafes, dormitories and just lying on the grass. Everyone talked and shared their knowledge.

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    Workflow

    Personally, I have come across from communication a huge number of ideas and even some business insiders . For example, one guy from Brazil (!) Participated in the Kaggle contest, which was held by Avito (!). He asked me about morphology and other features of our “great and mighty” Russian language.

    Free time


    There was not much free time, since everyone was busy with their projects, but the students had an open pool , a gym , a large number of sites for group sports, as well as a large campus area for walking.

    Our guys played basketball (there are problems with European football;)).

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    Sports Activities

    The closest place for more sophisticated entertainment is Boston : it can be reached by bus or taxi, so many students spent their weekends there.

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    MIT

    What are the results?


    Stephen's tweet about school:

    According to the results of the project, each student had to create a presentation, a brief description of the project on one page, as well as a clearly designed code. After the preparation was performance at 2 minutes of each student to the general public and on the same day took place the so-called Poster Session ( Poster: Session ), where students hang out business pages of your project, and everyone who wants to can read and discuss any project with the creator. Stephen also

    talked with each participant and gave his assessment and ideas for future development. The stand of our group

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    My project


    My idea was to build client analytics based on vk.com open data . The result was two areas:

    First idea : vk.com is a huge source of customer information. Posts in groups can reflect the real attitude of users to a specific product or service, therefore, it is possible, based on the posts of a group on a specific topic, to understand the real needs of users, their problems and ideas. The data obtained can be used to help build a marketing strategy.

    Second idea: vk.com - a large body of knowledge in a “living” language, so we can use the machine learning technology to teach the system how to make predictions. In my project, I took vk.com groups devoted to various kinds of diseases and built a predictive model, which at the input is given some kind of phrase with a description of the symptoms, and at the output the user gets the name of the disease.

    The main problem in my work was that the Wolfram system partially supports the Russian language. I had to find workarounds to get the right result. I really hope that during my stay I was able to convince the right people about the need to improve the system with Russian-speaking sources. =) I

    plan to continue working with the system further to implement my projects and ideas.

    All Mathematica!

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    For questions about Wolfram technologies, write to info-russia@wolfram.com

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