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.

2023

Patrick Scheibe

Research Scientist, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

Areas: Data Analytics, Programming, Software Engineering

Patrick Scheibe boasts a dynamic and illustrious career journey in academia and industry. He spent over a decade at Leipzig University, where he played a pivotal role in leading an image and data processing unit, enabling researchers to quantify medical and biological experiments easily. During his PhD studies, he took a deep dive into the intricacies of the human fovea, extensively utilizing Wolfram Language to model and quantify this crucial eye region from optical coherence tomography scans. Subsequently, Patrick’s expertise took him to the neurophysics department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, where he continues to work on data processing for quantitative MRIs.

Patrick is a highly versatile professional with a wide range of expertise beyond academia. He has worked as a consultant using Mathematica on various projects focused on simulations, modeling and data analyses in diverse domains for companies like Daimler, Procter & Gamble and Dow Chemical. Patrick has been developing and maintaining the Wolfram Language integration for JetBrains IDEs since 2012. His exceptional skills and expertise have led him to join the IntelliJ Platform SDK team at JetBrains. In addition, Patrick has developed several syntax highlighters for Wolfram Language, one of which has been used on the official Mathematica Stack Exchange site, where he is an enthusiastic moderator and member.

2023

Mark Rawlins

Executive Chairperson and Chief Engineer, Energy and Combustion Services

Areas: Mechanical Engineering, Research and Analysis, Software Engineering

Energy and Combustion Services offers global energy management analytics and autonomous measurement systems for large-scale mining and industrial manufacturing. Mark Rawlins is a professional engineer (mechanical), certified energy manager, and measurement and verification professional. He specializes in energy system modeling for efficiency and productivity, using digital twins to simulate and support new designs. His primary goal is aiding companies in transitioning to net-zero carbon emissions while maintaining efficiency. He also develops advanced metering systems that provide insights into energy and process deviations, some operating autonomously.

Wolfram Language is foundational to his R&D work, which includes a road condition monitoring system that marries vision-based road defect detection and location with vehicle dynamics and vibration signal processing using edge computation to report road and safety conditions autonomously. Separate devices can communicate and accept instructions from each other for extended inspections.

2023

Sander Huisman

Professor, Physics of Fluids, University of Twente

Areas: Data Analysis, Physics, Software Development, Software Engineering

Sander Huisman has been using Mathematica since 2003 for the processing of all his data, creating figures and visualizations and doing complicated fits and optimizations. Furthermore, he uses Mathematica’s interactive capabilities to generate illustrative examples in his fluid mechanics classes. He also uses it recreationally for the production of generated art for the yearly GENUARY event. He is also a contributor to the Wolfram Function Repository, having created over one hundred functions.

2023

J. William Helton

Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, University of California San Diego

Areas: Geometry, Mathematics, Software Engineering

J. William Helton’s group developed the package NCAlgebra for doing general-purpose noncommutative algebra in Mathematica. It began around 1990 and has been extended continually since then. From his work at the origins of noncommutative geometry and H-infinity control, Helton kept seeing such noncommutative formulas and hoping computer algebra could help. So, with Bob Miller, he started NCAlgebra and developed algorithms to find out. Around the year 2000, linear control theory shifted away from equalities to inequalities, e.g. from Riccati equations to linear matrix inequalities. This motivated Helton and a few others to begin what has developed into an elegant theory of noncommutative inequalities, to wit, a noncommutative version of real algebraic geometry. NCAlgebra seriously accelerated (and was accelerated by) this development.

A booming area full of noncommutative algebra is quantum information theory, and that is the main direction of current NCAlgebra development. Major contributions to NCAlgebra are being made by Mauricio de Oliveira and have also come from Mark Stankus and from many University of California San Diego students.

2023

Tyson Jones and Simon Benjamin

Tyson Jones, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Oxford
Simon Benjamin, Professor of Quantum Technologies, University of Oxford

Areas: Physics, Programming, Software Development, Software Engineering

Tyson Jones is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, studying first-generation quantum computers and their simulation via high-performance classical computing in the areas of quantum computing, high-performance computing, scientific simulation and software development. He is also a senior quantum software engineer at Quantum Motion Technologies and a consultant for the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre.

Jones’s doctoral work included the creation of QuESTlink, an open-source WSTP-powered package for simulating quantum computers, integrating the QuEST project’s hardware-accelerated numerics with Mathematica’s powerful symbolic engine. QuESTlink combines a plethora of Wolfram facilities, novel algorithms and high-performance computing techniques behind an intuitive API, enabling research-frontier computation through only a few lines of code.

Simon Benjamin , principal investigator (PI), is a professor of quantum technologies with the Materials Department at the University of Oxford. He leads a group of 17 applied theorists who look at diverse aspects of quantum computing, including architectures, fault tolerance and algorithms that are robust against hardware imperfections. His team created QuEST, a world-leading tool for classical emulation of quantum devices.

2021

James C. Wyant

Professor Emeritus of Optical Sciences and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona

Areas: Biomedical Research, Education, Physics, Software Engineering

James C. Wyant was the founding dean of the College of Optical Sciences. He was also the founder of the WYKO Corporation. His company is known for having manufactured and sold phase-shifting interferometers for testing optics that later were used for measuring the shape of the recording heads used in computer hard-disk drives. At one point, every major manufacturer of hard-disk drives globally purchased WYKO instruments to test the recording heads of their drives. He founded another company in 2002 known as 4D Technology. There, he developed single-shot phase-shifting interferometers that, unlike other interferometers, give accurate results in the presence of vibration and air turbulence, thus making them very useful in manufacturing environments.

2021

Richard Carbone

Digital Forensic Analyst & Researcher, Defence R&D Canada

Areas: Data Analysis, Data Science, Research and Analysis, Software Engineering

Richard Carbone is a digital forensic analyst and researcher at Defence R&D Canada, where his work involves investigations into advanced persistent threats, state actors and insider threats. He writes and designs tools using Mathematica to solve certain digital forensic problems that have not been adequately addressed by the community or by digital forensic software vendors. (The growth in Mathematica’s image processing capabilities specifically has made it a useful tool in digital forensics.) Examples of his prototyped tools include a forensic image analysis system and a binary file analysis system, the latter of which helps the user visually identify the underlying data and structure patterns inherent in most file formats. Carbone additionally has conducted research with federal law enforcement to define Canada’s standards for forensic analysis of computer memory.

2015

Juan Pablo Carvallo Vega

CEO, Ecuador National Network of Research and Education

Areas: Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Telecommunication and Network Management

Dr. Carvallo’s long-term vision for using Wolfram technologies to innovate education and research in Ecuador has introduced academic services and professional research previously unknown or underused in Ecuador, including high-speed internet access, research repositories, Eduroam, Telemedicine, and high-performance computing services. Under his leadership at CEDIA (National Research and Education Network of Ecuador), Dr. Carvallo leverages Wolfram technologies to develop, document, and systematize education and research efforts and resources in Ecuador. He is devoted to creating the next generation of scientific, educational, and research talent needed to support a knowledge-driven economy within the country.