Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Wolfram Summer School

Alumni

Marco Guidetti

Summer School

Class of 2012

Bio

Marco Guidetti doesn’t really like to talk about himself. He has a PhD in physics and is now a post-doc at the Institute for BioComputation and Physics of Complex Systems of the University of Zaragoza, Spain.

When not on a plane, he’s usually fiddling around with computers trying to simulate phase transitions, with varying degrees of success, mostly of spin glasses (and optimization problems, somewhat linked). He has also been part of the collaboration that developed the Janus supercomputer and that is now preparing the next iteration (Janus 2). He is in love with the Potts Glass (the disordered version of the Potts model), his wife Chiara, and their daughter, Emma. He likes and tries to program whatever thing he can put his hands on. In general he prefers Python and C, but lately he has dusted off his acquaintance with Mathematica, with lots of joy.

Project: Epistemology via Wikipedia

In project I will try to reap information from Wikipedia, grow a graph of it, and investigate relationships.

A simple case study could be: given a subject (say, “subatomic particles”), who are the relevant people related to the subject, which places are the interesting ones, and/or what are other interesting subjects?

I plan to do that using a web spider starting from the subject to get pages up to a distance (measured in “links”) and then growing the graph and analyzing it.

You can download the poster of my project here.

Here is a playable example of my project. Starting from “Stranger in a Strange Land” (no catalogs here; they will be at the demo), I have built a few graphs and I show how I analyze them.

If you haven’t read Stranger in a Strange Land (R.A. Heinlein), go order/buy it right now.

Favorite Four-Color, Four State Turing Machine

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