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We are pleased to announce that Wolfram|Alpha is featured on the cover of the July/August 2009 issue of MIT’s Technology Review magazine. The article provides industry context for the project as well as an inside perspective on the events leading up to the launch. The issue, including an 8-page spread focusing on Wolfram|Alpha, is available online today and should arrive in subscriber mailboxes this week.
The story includes exclusive interviews with Stephen Wolfram and other members of the Wolfram|Alpha team. The following is an excerpt from the piece:
“Williams wasn’t toiling in a redoubt of Silicon Valley Web entrepreneurs but in a midwestern citadel of science geeks: Wolfram Research, in Champaign, IL, housed in an office block overlooking a Walgreens and a McDonald’s. This was the corporate lair of Stephen Wolfram, the physicist and maker of Mathematica, which is generally acknowledged to be the most complete technical and graphical software for mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. Williams was working on something his company was calling a “computational knowledge engine”: Wolfram Alpha. In response to questions, Alpha was meant to compute answers rather than list Web pages. It would consist of three elements, honed by hand in Champaign: a constantly expanding collection of data sets, an elaborate calculator, and a natural-language interface for queries.”
“Search Me,”
Technology Review
To read more, visit the Technology Review website, or look for the new issue on United States’ newsstands.
It is the first time touching about Wolfram|Alpha?and make a mark
Great! I read it online. . It mentions that W|A is intended to provide proof of its output by including the source of every piece of knowledge and quoting those sources if asked. It also suggests that the volume of data is far beyond the W|A company resources to render compatible with W|A. I suggest they delegate that task to outsiders and concentrate on the curation function.
Stephen Wolfram started by defininjg W|A as a Computational Knowledge Engine Subsequent announcements made it clear that it is a ‘Computational Curated Knowledge Engine’ and this article makes it clear that it is an ‘Auditable Computational Curated Knowledge Engine’
Congratulations for the cover of the July/August 2009 issue of MIT’s Technology Review magazine. Knowledge for everybody and everywhere!