Wolfram Innovator Award 2018

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.

Neil Singer

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Areas: Authoring and Publishing, Financial Risk, Probability Theory

Dr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a world-renowned researcher and author with dozens of published papers relating to the philosophical, mathematical and practical issues with probability, especially in the fields of financial risk and decision making. His multivolume work Incerto, which covers broad facets of uncertainty, has been translated into 37 languages. He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, with a focus on properties of “antifragile” systems whose functioning improves with disorder. Dr. Taleb has used Mathematica extensively in his work, including for research into non-idealized probabilistic decision-making models and computational pre-asymptotics.