2024

Fei Du

Associate Professor of Accountancy, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Associate Academic Director, Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society

Areas: Accounting Analysis, Computational Thinking, Data Analytics, Financial Analysis

Fei Du is an associate professor of accountancy at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the interaction between users and designers of managerial accounting systems and has been published in top academic journals, including The Accounting Review, the Review of Accounting Studies, Contemporary Accounting Research, the Academy of Management Journal and the Journal of Management Accounting Research.

Du teaches courses in data analytics at the graduate level, emphasizing computational thinking and decision making. She leverages Wolfram Language for its powerful capabilities in accessing curated financial and socioeconomic data, which complements traditional accounting metrics. She also integrates real-world capital market events, news and case studies to enhance students’ understanding of business insights.

Du is also the author of Creative Data Analytics: Computational Recipes to Gain Insights into Businesses, published by Wolfram Media. This book features a mouse-driven interface that allows students to input data—ranging from website URLs to images and PDF files—and generate real-time computational results. Her innovative teaching approach integrates text and images from websites, CEO portraits and financial reports, blending traditional financial spreadsheet tools with advanced computational capabilities powered by Wolfram Language.

2023

Thomas R.H. Tibbles

Head of International Equities, Madison Investments

Areas: Data Science, Finance, Financial Analysis, Software Engineering

Tom Tibbles and his team have focused for decades on implementing a well-tested and successful investment strategy to invest portfolios of international stocks. Over the last few years, he has led the team to embrace the Wolfram technology stack to make the process explicit in software and to enhance, accelerate and improve the quality and consistency of the workflow.

Financial data can be sliced cross-sectionally, through time or simultaneously by both curating and provisioning processed data in multidimensional matrix structures—“DataCubes.” Doing so has made it highly efficient to execute the desired types of data manipulations and visualizations in Mathematica.

The project pipeline began by writing custom APIs to extract data locked in silos; legacy procedures were then translated and separated into hundreds of “CustomMetrics” to clean and increase the information content of individual data segments. After the release of Mathematica 12, the project expanded to take advantage of the entity store data framework.

Additional projects have focused, within a Wolfram Language package, on automating the integration and enhancement of data and sequencing the workflow steps across multiple internal and external data sources and applications. Lastly, user experience was vastly improved with the custom development of a GUI to access, examine further and manipulate data while dynamically displaying the visual reports.

2015

UnRisk Development Team

MathConsult GmbH and uni software plus GmbH

Areas: Financial Analysis, Industrial Mathematics, Risk Management, Software Development

MathConsult GmbH and uni software plus GmbH share this award for their work in the development and continued success of the UnRisk family of products, built on the Wolfram Language and used in the finance industry for financial derivatives and risk analytics. The two companies are closely linked, working together on numerous other industrial mathematics consultancy projects, and are based at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. They have been long-term advocates of Wolfram technologies, a byproduct of the strong sales and marketing partnership uni software plus has had with Wolfram for over two decades. Michael Aichinger, Stefan Janecek, and Sascha Kratky were present to accept the award on behalf of both companies, but special mention must go to Michael Schwaiger, Andreas Binder, and Herbert Exner, who were unable to collect the award in person.

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.