The growth of small devices that are easy to carry around has emphasized “mobility”, “mobile learning” and “mobile computing”. With the rapid growth in wireless network access, the other dimension that emerges is “connectedness” – the ability to communicate and access computing resources independent of location or wired internet access.
Earlier this month, Stephen Wolfram launched the “Connected Devices” project, an attempt to curate all things that can be connected and communicated with, either with wires or without. But the real advance is the introduction of WDF – the Wolfram Data Framework, which proposed a standardized way of storing, transforming and manipulating the data that these devices can generate. Anyone who recalls high school physics knows the pain that can arise from conversions among physical units (“micropascals per square root hertz” anyone?) . WDF handles this and allows users to explore and represent complex datasets, including those with images, geodata or higher-dimensional physical quantities – with relative ease. The Wolfram language is starting to be embedded into new families of tiny processors, such as those based on Intel Quark Technology, opening the possibility of powerful computations taking place in wearable devices.
I’ll take one of each, please.
