WOLFRAM

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.

Presented at the Wolfram Technology Conferences. Learn more

2020

Pedro Paulo Balbi de Oliveira

Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie

Areas: Complex Systems, Computer Science, Education, Electrical Engineering, Software Development

Pedro Paulo Balbi de Oliveira is a professor at Brazil’s Mackenzie Presbyterian University who has made extensive use of Mathematica in his research on cellular automata and evolutionary computation. This has led to the continuous development of a cellular automata toolbox, which spun off a cellular multi-agent research system and a package to represent families of cellular automata. As a whole, these efforts have provided the core computational basis for the publication of over 80 research papers and for about 50 postgraduate and undergraduate student degrees.

2019

Mihai Vidrighin

R&D Lead, PsiQuantum

Areas: Electrical Engineering, Image Processing, Physics, System Modeling

Mihai Vidrighin is a researcher in photonics who has used Mathematica extensively throughout his career. During his PhD thesis, he used Mathematica to run simulations and data analytics involving quantum thermodynamics, and he continues to recommend the system to colleagues. He currently leads a team developing a photonics component for generating single photon pairs with new accuracy and scale. In this project, he has used the Wolfram Language to build an extremely comprehensive model for nonlinear and quantum optics to describe photon-pair generation and quantum optics circuits. Vidrighin has also written several Wolfram Language packages for quantum optics simulation and electron microscope image processing.

2018

Neil Singer

President, AC Kinetics, Inc.

Areas: Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, System Modeling

Dr. Singer is a mechanical engineer and entrepreneur who used Mathematica Version 1 in research to reduce vibrations in electric machines. Since then, he has heavily encouraged innovative uses of Wolfram technology within the engineering community. In 2013 he founded AC Kinetics, a company that uses the Wolfram Language and Wolfram SystemModeler to simulate and verify models for digital motor controller designs. The Wolfram workflow has provided the team with significant savings on development and computation time, and their resulting prototypes have reduced energy consumption by nearly 50% in some cases. Licensees of AC Kinetics products include many high-profile companies, such as NASA, Westinghouse and HP. In the future, Dr. Singer and his team hope to create interactive digital twins for real-time analysis and updating of models.

2015

Joseph Hirl

Founder, CEO, and CTO, Agilis Energy, LLC

Areas: Electrical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering

Joseph Hirl started using Mathematica at Enron in the late 1990s. (His group had originally purchased Maple, but broke it within a week.) After making the switch to Wolfram technologies, Hirl developed a commercial tool that analyzes and visualizes energy data for organizations’ buildings. Using “smart meter” data as input—and through extensive processing, pattern recognition, and image visualization—Hirl and his team are able to provide insights related to a building and its behavior under a wide range of conditions. Using EnterpriseCDF as a reporting tool, he demonstrates existing energy inefficiencies and recommends opportunities for improvement through CDF-powered tables, charts, and MRI-like visualizations.

2015

Mark Adler

Project Manager, Low Density Supersonic Decelerator Project

Areas: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Physics

Mark Adler is best known for his work in the field of data compression as the author of the Adler-32 checksum function, and as co-author of the zlib compression library and gzip. He was also the Spirit Cruise Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission and is an instrument-rated private pilot, a certified scuba diver, and an amateur theater actor. Mark has used Mathematica for decades, including during his work on the Mars Exploration Mission. Using NDSolve and numeric integers, the team simulated entry through a variety of changing conditions to mitigate risk and more accurately predict a successful landing.

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