Wolfram Summer School website

Every summer, Wolfram Research holds a Summer School for everyone from all over the world. Within the school, each participant gets the opportunity to learn the Wolfram Language and implement his project, which will be personally supervised by Stephen Wolfram and the Wolfram Research team of experts.
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In the past 2015, Anna Kudryashova visited Wolfram Summer School (IT analyst, kudryashova.info ). You can read her story below.

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Wolfram Research , led by Stephen Wolfram, conducts various educational programs for schoolchildren, students, scientists, and businessmen. In this article I would like to talk about the event, which was held in the summer of 2015 and in which I was fortunate enough to participate.

WOLFRAM SUMMER SCHOOL 2015

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

Science ( Science ) school has been running since 2003 for students and already practicing specialists from various fields. The school aims to show how Wolfram Research software can help further research. In addition to the scientific school, an experiment was conducted in 2015 and the Innovation School was created, in which students were asked to create a small website using Wolfram system tools, that is, students had to create a full-fledged application for a wide range of consumers.

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

How to get?

1. Application

It is necessary to fill in the form on the page of summer projects. You can get acquainted with summer schools here and here you can expect the opening of registration for the program .

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

2. Interview

Then it takes time to review your application by the commission. In my case, the answer came in two days . If what you describe in the application corresponds to the ideas of employees about prospective students, then you are scheduled to be interviewed in person or via video link.

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

In my case, the interview took place in person in Moscow, it took about an hour and a half , where we talked about the above topics. The most difficult thing for me was probably 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 are sent an official invitation , some clarifying information and given some time to think about the answer. After your consent, a questionnaire is sent to you, in which you fill in various data on accommodation, meals, etc. Then you only need to pay for room and board (if you have chosen accommodation and meals on campus) and get ready for school! HOORAY!

4. Arrival

In my case, the invitation came a few days after the interview, I paid for the accommodation and tickets and after three weeks I was in Massachusetts with other students of the school. Here people from all over the globe , from Brazil to Australia, with an education from an average to a doctoral degree, have gathered.

Where was the training?

Bentley university
Bentley University, the city of Voltam, Massachusetts.


Main building


University Symbol

Students had to arrive at the agreed several days in June at the Bentley University, Massachusetts , where they were registered.

Many students have chosen the hostel for their stay, as the cheapest and most convenient option. The convenience of this placement was in proximity to the location of the classes.


Hostel


The lock on the door to the rooms in the dorm

How was the training?

Training

To train students, it was necessary to install Mathematica in advance on a computer, a license for the product was provided, if necessary.


My training kit

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

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

Training mode

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


Lecture

Lecture topics

Lectures were very different, there were both learning the basics of programming in the Wolfram Mathematica system, as well as Stephen's stories about his company and about business creation strategies in general.

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

However, in my opinion, the basic idea of ​​learning was aimed at showing the endless possibilities of the Wolfram system to help students implement their ideas . For example, topics such as machine learning, image manipulation, Arduino programming, etc. were covered.

Project

Depending on the specialization and interests, each student was assigned a mentor who was supposed to help his students in everything. After talking with the mentor, the students had to decide on an exemplary project within the first week, after that each of the students had a personal meeting with Stephen Wolfram so that he would recognize you, your professional interest, help with the topic and implementation of the project, and also gave valuable ideas and shared your thoughts. After determining the project for two weeks , it was proposed to complete it completely, after which the presentation took place.


Mentor helps with the code before the presentation

Working atmosphere

The atmosphere was just awesome. Everywhere people worked: in auditoriums, cafes, hostels and just lying on the grass. Everyone communicated and shared their knowledge.


The working process

Personally, I got a lot of ideas from communication and even some business insiders . For example, one guy from Brazil (!) Participated in the Kaggle competition, which was held by Avito (!). He asked me about the 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 a swimming pool , a gym , a large number of sites for group sports, and a large campus area was available for walking.

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



Sports activities

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


MIT

What are the results?

Steven'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 clear code. After preparation, there was a 2-minute presentation of each student in front of the general public, and on the same day the so-called Poster Session took place, where students put up business pages of their project and anyone who wants can read and discuss any project with the creator.

Also, Stephen spoke with each participant and gave his assessment and ideas for future development.


Stand of our group

My project

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

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

The second idea : vk.com is a large array of knowledge in a “live” language, so we can use the machine learning technologies to teach the system to make predictions. In my project, I took vk.com groups dedicated to various kinds of diseases and built a predictive model, which receives a phrase describing symptoms at the entrance, and the user gets the name of the disease at the output.

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 work of the system with Russian-speaking sources. =)

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

All Mathematica!



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