Wolfram Innovator Award 2013

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.

Sam Daniel

Areas: Control Engineering, Engineering, Signal Processing

Sam Daniel has been using Mathematica since 1988—the year Mathematica 1.0 was launched—to complete a range of innovative projects from patented work on fingerprint identification algorithms for Motorola to spearheading signal processing projects for Raytheon Missile Systems. His mastery of Mathematica has enabled him to document his work and share those results with others, bringing invaluable insights to areas from adaptive antenna simulation to radar ground clutter characterization. Sam’s continued work with Mathematica will include creating elaborate Enterprise CDFs from Wolfram SystemModeler for possible automatic extraction of parameters and control placement.

George Danner

Areas: Industrial Engineering, Industrial Engineering Economics

In his role as President of Business Laboratory, LLC, George Danner uses Mathematica to solve complex problems for mid-size and large businesses and government organizations. Following the flu outbreaks that took health agencies by surprise in 2008, Danner simulated a hypothetical outbreak in Alabama. As a result, state and federal health officials were able to role-play a series of outbreaks and identify barriers to outbreak response. Other accomplishments include assisting an energy company with over 1,100 natural gas wells in identifying an optimal drilling sequence and helping a large national retailer double its number of stores by using simulated shopper agents to determine optimal locations.