As a ‘technology evangelist’ librarian firmly rooted in traditions that go back to Paul Otlet, Melville Dewey and John Shaw Billings, I admit that I can search for medical evidence and even understand some studies’ conclusions. However, I am envious of anyone who can perform quantitative analysis for a systematic review. Statistics boggle the mind, especially biostatistics. Ugh.
So when WolframAlpha was announced as a tool that can compute answers to math problems – I admit, I had a frisson of anticipation thinking about what this search tool might do for me. WolframAlpha is set to go live in May 2009 and is said to be ‘a virtual research assistant’ for those who need math help.
WolframAlpha is likely to be useful for mathematicians, science and even medical students. WolframAlpha will present its users with a pared-down, simple search box (like Google). But it won’t just list websites based on link-love – it will compute answers based on a collection of facts and statistical-analysis software. Woohoo, take that biostats friend!
The hype has been building after a New York Times article called it “the most anticipated Web tool” to be released in 2009. Here is Stephen Wolfram, a scientist known for creating Mathematica, number-crunching software popular with engineers and mathematicians. He presented his new tool at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society late last month.
Gosh, I hope this works ~Dean
my site acts as a guide to wolfram alpha search.
Linguistic understanding analysis – to understand the input. You get to interact with it how you naturally think about things. Natural language processing. –mapping the language to the symbolic representations in #2