European Wolfram Technology Conference 2014 is Announced

The EWTC 2014 is announced. It was really great 2013. We had the privilege to collect four talks - including client presentations of groundbreaking projects: the UnRisk Financial Language atop the Wolfram language, machine learning framework, the PlateMod factory for the high performance simulation of rolling processes and tailor-made C Code Generation with the SymbolicC package,

EWTC 2014 will be a highlight for us also this year.

This year we will submit a talk about the valuation of a famous swap.  A Swap between "the City" and "the Bank"  that has attracted some attention. It landed at the court.

The talk will point out that scenario analytics is a must and how UnRisk and Mathematica help to explain complex concepts to non experts, whilst at the same time make the proper valuations and risk analytics for risk experts.

We are looking forward again to meeting those who make Mathematica, other solution and add on developers and users.

We Speak at the European Wolfram Technology Conference 2013

The program of the EWTC 2013 is now published. We are involved in 4 talks.

Thomas Natschläger presents the latest achievements in mlf and its application in industrial applications.
Michaeil Schwaiger talks about programming financial services the Mathematica style in UnRisk.

Erik Parteder, about a joint project, PlateMod, in his steel company.

A few more lines on this exciting project:
Erik is a researcher and developer at voestalpine Grobblech. The project started with a high performance simulation of the rolling processes and aims now on an integrated company wide system in R&D and production. For engineers from material science, metallurgy and automation. With Mathematica as platform.

The core of the system will be the thermodynamic process simulation and control based on finite element methods with surrogate models to get the required speed.

A FACTORY is a FACTORY

But the architecture for the enterprise system is amazing. It is quite similar to the UnRisk FACTORY technology. That seems to be a reference architecture. And not surprisingly it is called PlateMod - FACTORY.  See the picture.

It integrates blazingly fast process control engines in C++ into Mathematica, manipulated by services that combine parallelized simulation and data management, and web services supporting the web front-end. It will utilize gridMathematica and webMathematica.

Our efforts in careful architectural design in all larger projects pay really back - as well as our deep interest in the intersection point between mathematics and computer science.

We Join the European Wolfram Technology Conference 2013

For many years now we have spoken at the WTCs in Champaign. And we are most happy that Wolfram offers a European event now. Don't miss the EWTC 2013 11/12-Jun-13.

For us it will be a highlight of this year.

We will go there as developers of industry scale solutions atop Mathematica. It is amazing, how our decision for hybrid programming with Mathematica pays back. Even the most complex components can be tied together so easily. One might call us whirlwind programmers relying on swift domain-specific, declarative programming calling engines that are blazingly fast themselves.
In the frame of our open information policies we are pleased to present the how-to in detail.

And we will go there as Wolfram partner, convincing our customers and users to join us, present their innovations, ...

And we are looking forward to meet again those, who develop Mathematica and other solution developers and users.

SystemModeler Seminar - A Day in System Engineering

23-Oct-12, TU Vienna, Boecklsaal (Herbert Boeckl - Austrian painter) - Mathematica in Computaional System Engineering.

The spirited panel and individual discussions made it quite obvious to me: over 40 delegates from academic institutions and industry found the seminar as exciting as myself.

Computational system engineering has so many aspects and we tried to describe it from the foundation of advanced technical problem solving to the benchmarks grown in the historical co-evolution of problems and scientific achievements and to the latest practical solution.

Michael Aichinger, partner of uni soft are plus, gave a guided tour through the areas of Mathematica 8 most relevant to system engineering. He emphasized on accurate and blazingly fast solvers derived from the combination of advanced math and software engineering including symbolic and inherent parallelization utilizing the new computing muscles and the possibility to integrate special hardware with the link technologies of Mathematica - how can advanced numerical schemes to calibrating a sophisticated PDE based model be implemented on a GPU ...

Felix Breitenecker, Professor for applied mathematics, mathematical modeling and simulation at the Vienna University of Technology, draw the emergence of requirements on modeling and simulation in a historic context of simulation languages and systems as well as mathematical development and research results. It was amazing, how he developed a criteria list that grew "naturally" along the talk - with full explanation, why. For modeling, simulation and its interplay.
Model-transformations to enable better solving, symbolic and numerical computation with regime switching, hybrid computation, .. co-simulation.

Jan Brugard, CEO of Wolfram MathCore, presented "his" SystemModeler in the context of the requirements and showcased in real live examples what an advanced stand-alone tool can do for modeling and simulation of dynamic multi-engineering systems and how its link to Mathematica completes a workflow that integrates analysis, design and control optimization.

Felix Breitenecker made the encore by showing the modeling and simulation of a "hammer" that was used at the world's first known salt mines - during Hallstatt culture. His team modeled it in SystemModeler.

Applause .....

Meet UnRisk in Tokyo

Wolfram Research Asia, Hulinks and us invite to a seminar presenting the Wolfram Finance Platform and UnRisk in Tokyo.

UnRisk and Wolfram Finance Platform for Advanced Derivative Analytics and Risk Management

23-Oct-12, 13:00 to 17:00, Shoken Building, Tokyo, Japan

Event Type: a free-to-attend seminar

Details: Event Page

At the event, UnRisk will point out that there are reasons to introduce numerical schemes that are not common in financial circles and present the UnRisk way to providing process-through consistency to valuation and risk management.

The UnRisk CEO will also present how UnRisk integrated the optimized pricing and calibration engines  into Mathematica, taking full advantage of its, declarative language, inherent parallelism and analytics capabilities.

Celebrating 11 Years Of UnRisk

6-Nov-12, Grand Hotel, Vienna, Austria

Theme of the Event: the co-eveolution of customer experiences and technology development in quantitative risk management.

It has a lot to do with the innovative spiral driven by advanced mathematical schemes and generic technologies. With Mathematica as platform for solutions and development systems in one.

Customer talks will show the vast variety of UnRisk/Mathematica usages and benefits.

Raiffeisen Upper Austria examines the importance of Model Validation - using UnRisk engines as universal pricing tools in trading, for 11 years now (UnRisk/Mathematica called from large Excel books).

Raiffeisen Capital Management, Austria's leading investment fund company, explains why and how they built an in-house developed integrated market risk system relying on full valuation employing historic simulation - with a GridServer version of UnRisk/Mathematica.

Solventis, Barcelona, presents their evolutionary approach when making a comprehensive valuation and risk management web service for their wide customer base - atop the UnRisk FACTORY, the VaR Universe and webUnRisk/webMathematica.

Axicorda, London, discusses smart transparency through on-demand risk and hedging analytics - building such online service on top of UnRisk-Q/Mathematica.

Deloitte Financial Advisory, explains why great auditors do not only audit and their way of applying advanced analytics in derivatives pricing through a System-as-a-Server model - with UnRisk-Q, the VaR Universe and UnRisk services (linking UnRisk/Mathematica and a data managemen system)

Credit Suisse Private Banking, Advisory Innovations, Zurich, introduces an innovative way to approach clients: explain complex financial concepts to non experts - on smart devices with new mathematical implementations by the UnRisk team.

UnRisk will present the 11 success factors.

For more info:the  Event Page.

Wolfram SystemModeler Seminar

In Big System for the Small I have pointedly argued that small units often need the same methods and tools as the industry giants. This is definitely true in process and manufacturing engineering and automation.

And that it is a matter of information and awareness creation. I promised to organize a SystemModeler Seminar. Here it is. New Technologies in System Modeling and Simulation. An opportunity to hear from a top researcher and technology providers and implementers on the latest advances of platforms for revolutionizing engineering and controlling complex systems.

We Speak at Wolfram Technology Conference 2012

We not only attend the Wolfram Technology Conference 2012 but also speak. In "UnRisk-Q Instrument Builder" we will point out how the UnRisk-Mathematica programming framework makes the development of an individual valuation system easy using a high-level domain-specific language. Our latest developments drive this even further. Quant developers are now able to write arbitrary coupon schedules of structured products in Mathematica and the valuation is then performed by the blazingly fast but accurate UnRisk pricing and calibration engines.

In the talk we will show a range of callable/putable, interest rate, inflation or FX linked structured products that can be easily set up with this powerful new feature.

With UnRisk-Q we have unleashed the programming power behind the UnRisk FACTORY, our flagship solution for advanced risk management processes.

It is really amazing, how our decision for hybrid programming with Mathematica pays back. Even the most complex components can be tied together so easily. I characterize our developments as whirlwind programming: domain-specific and  declarative programming enables the swift creation of new features that are blazingly fast bay calling performance-optimized engines utilizing the new computing muscles.

We really look forward to joining Wolfram and other developers and users at the conference.

Deep Space Analytics and Computational Finance

Why accuracy and speed matters and how horrible things can go if you don't treat in-the-loop-calibration with care.
UnRisk hosted a lecture at for finance industry professionals in the frame of Wilmott's Finance Focus on 22-May-12 in London - Deep Space Analytics was the title.

It is recorded and presented at Willmott Online.

The speakers explained in the core of the talk what deep space analytics and computational finance have in common:

Data are changing rapidly and only fats, stable and robust algorithms can meet the requirements.
It is often difficult to distinguish between information and noise. Financial data are even erratic. Improper methods might lead to artifacts.
Different deep space objects need various methods for their detection and exploration. Derivatives and portfolio analytics need multi-model and multi-method approaches.

We Speak at Wolfram Technology Conference 2011

We not only attend the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011 but also speak. In "UnRisk 5 & Mathematica 8 - Blazingly fast an Insightful Analytics" we will highlight that Value at Risk (VaR) is not the end but the beginning of advance risk management processes. The VaR Universe of UnRisk 5 calculates a VaR cube for the deeper understanding of risk sources and impact of different risk factors. UnRisk's blazingly fast numerical schemes together with the computational power imposed by parallel architectures controlled by Mathematica 8 enable the calculation of such VaR cubes within minutes. 

We will point out how the UnRisk-Mathematicas programming framework makes the development of customized risk management application quick and easy. This together with the advanced visualization techniques and the ability for rapid GUI development and dynamic graphics in Mathematica 8 allow for insightful risk analytics and reporting.

It is really amazing how our decision to use Mathematica as platform for UnRisk pays back. Even the most complex components can be tied together so easily. Driving CUDA over the Grid, transaction processing, dynamic visualization, task and work-flow automation, ... 

We really look forward to joining Wolfram and other developers and users at the conference.

Austria - Mathematica Conference 2011

Things are moving so fast. We have now experienced working with Mathematica 8 since Nov-2011. At work we were inspired to thinking into new directions, like the combination of Mathematica 8's most comprehensive statistics and probability solvers and functions and our machine learning framework devotes to econometrics problems, or look deeper into econophysics studying pricing formation of financial instruments and the behavior of underlyers.
Financial risk management has already forced us to drive CUDA over the Grid in UnRisk.

On 6-Oct-11 we will present our and others experiences at the Austria - Mathematica Conference 2011 in Vienna.

The conference is packed with tips, tricks and techniques from developers and experts who have developed hundreds of thousands of lines of Mathematica code in hybrid environments with C++, Java, SQL, Web Services, ...

Mathematica Virtual Conference 2011

The Wolfram Mathematica Virtual Conference  has been announced recently. September 26, and September 27, 2011 to serve different time zones.
The virtual event will be packed with tips, tricks and techniques from Wolfram developers and experts. The agenda features 25 talks across 5 tracks.

• Discover Mathematica
• What's New in Mathematica 8
• Applying Mathematica in Industry & Research
• Applying Mathematica in Education
• Developing on the Mathematica Platform

First we build the tools - Than thy build us, said Marshal McLuhan. Yes, this is true for the Mathematica Platform and its comprehensive dynamic interaction forms, including the direct way to create and play the Computational Document Format (CDF). 

Wolfram Technology Conference 2011

has been just been announced. It is again a must for us.
As developers of hybrid systems we look forward to absorbing news in technologies-in-HPC-environments and sharing experiences in CUDA programming (after 2 years of optimizing valuation and calibration engines for financial instruments combining new algorithms with massive parallelism on concrete NVIDIA architectures).
But also app and interface construction , web deployments and clearly computing with Wolfram|Alpha ...
And we look forward to meeting partners and friends.

Now Ready For Registration: GPU Acceleration in Finance Events

Wolfram, NVIDIA and UnRisk will present New Technologies For Accelerating Quantitative Analytics in London, Paris, Zurich, Frankfurt.
The UnRisk talk will focus on Efficient Valuation of Complex Derivatives on the GPU and give deep insight into the innovation I have outlined in Blazing Business.
The Registration Page.

I hope to meet you at one of the events.
You will benefit from

• seeing how to manage complexity and reduce time-time-to-insight in quantitative finance drastically
• live examples from the bank practice

We Speak at Analytics & Risk Technologies in Finance 2010

4-Nov-10, 10:30 am to 4:30 pm,  London.

Finance 2010 Conference organized by Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica.

In our talks, we want to point out that there are obvious technical and economic reasons to build large scale financial solutions in  the framework of Mathematica and how UnRisk ties numerical schemes that are not common in financial circles and symbolic representations to know-how packages.  And we want to point out that Mathematica's dynamic visualization techniques enable risk professionals to expose risk that is usually hidden in traditional representations.

Talks will cover

• background, technologies and coverage
• why instruments-models-methods-implementations shall be organized orthogonally
• why advanced numerical schemes and parameter identification integrated into Mathematica matters
• why advances visualization techniques unmask risk hidden in plain sight
• what implementers can learn from link technologies, HPC computing and the PlayStation

Answering questions like: can model risk be quantified? Is Montecarlo just gambling? Why are trees so bad and Finite Element techniques required? The parameter fit is so good, why is the price so bad?

In the talks, will give exclusive insight with full explanation of the mathematical techniques and present live examples from the advanced bank practice. 

We Speak at the Wolfram Technology Conference 2010

We not only attend the Wolfram Technology Conference 2010 but also speak. In "UnRisk - Taming the Machine Infernal" we will highlight some of the new algorithms implemented in UnRisk utilizing the power of GPUs and the application of these algorithms to problems in quantitative finance. 

Because Mathematica is used as a universal interface to the GPU programming frameworks CUDA and OpenCL, UnRisk users are not exposed to the low-level complexities of GPU programming.

The talk stands on the stable ground of comprehensive experiments. I have compiled the results in my other blog - Taming The Machine Infernal . 

In Champaign we will present the latest results and emphasize on the architectural benefits gained by the usage of Mathematica. It is really amazing how our decision to use Mathematica as platform for UnRisk pays back. Even the most complex components can be tied together so easily. Coarse- and fine-grain parallelization, transaction processing, dynamic visualization, task and work-flow automation, ... 

We really look forward to joining Wolfram and other developers and users at the conference.

Wolfram Technology Conference 2010

has been announced recently.

Being over 60, it is a bit scaring how time goes by, but we are looking forward to be there and absorb all news and see new developments live. As outlined in my blog description, I am interested in the intersection of math and computer science, but also in domain specific languages, data mining and machine learning, .. and due to the emergence of Wolfram|Alpha I expect answers to questions before I was able to ask them.

Our top talents must be there.

Final In The Castle

20-Nov-09, FIT, Institute for Applied Information Technology, organized the final-of-three Mathematica 7 compact seminars.

The Fraunhofer institute pursues a user-centered approach to information and cooperation systems design. Usability and usefulness of IT are optimized in the interplay of work practice, organization, and process design.

Harald Mathis, Head of BIOMOS, Biomolecular Optical Systems, provided the most beautiful seminar room in the castle of Birlinghoven / St. Augustin. Thank You!

Due to the IT focus of most of the attendees, Oliver Ruebenkoening emphasized on the platform character of Matematica 7 and gave full explanation on the most important link technologies.

In the spirited discussion this was also the major point: how easy Mathematica can be linked to other systems, like lab systems, data analytics systems, or control systems. Mathematica's declarative programming environment is perfect for coordinating and controlling them and apply task automation.

To me, it is always impressive, sitting in the train from Frankfurt to Siegburg/Bonn, browsing through the tunnels with over 300 km per hour. A warm! sunny Nov-day and a walk through the spacious park and woods around the castle added to my excitement.

Sun IS Shining

13-Nov-09, ISE, Institute for Solar Energy Systems , Freiburg hosted the second-of-three Mathematica 7 compact seminars.

The Fraunhofer Institute develops systems, components, materials and processes in the areas of the thermal use of solar energy, solar building, solar cells, electrical power supplies, chemical energy conversion, energy storage and the rational use of energy.

Axel Brendle, Head of IT, set up a perfect seminar environment in ISE,s impressive building. Thank you!

900 persons are employed at ISE. They have access to the latest technologies for their research and ground-breaking technology development. Networked and grid-enabled Mathematica 7 is widely used in modeling and simulation.

Oliver Rübenkoenig gave his talk for over 40 researchers from 10 Fraunhofer institutes located in the southern region of Germany. He emphasized on the fact that Mathematica's technology-foundation ties into many new features in Mathematica 7 and finally WolframAlpha for application developers.

The spirited discussion showed that computing-developing and deploying applications are increasingly important in industrial research. As an example, I want to mention ITWM's world-wide released Analog Insydes .

Again, I approached Freiburg by train from Frankfurt browsing along the Schwarzwald with the vineyards of famous vintners on the foothills (like Berhard Huber, Malterdingen, and his fantastic but rare Spätburgunder "R"). Innovative as Fraunhofer, in his field. And I like to walk through Freiburg, even if I only have an hour.

I am looking forward to the seminar in St. Augustin/Schloss Birlinghoven.

Those Are The Days

6-Nov-09, Fraunhofer Institute IWS, Dresden: the first-of-three Mathematica 7 compact seminars, a joint event of Fraunhofer, Wolfram Research and my uni software plus, took place at the impressive IWS facilities.

I found it exciting, and, I believe, also the participants from ten Fraunhofer institutes.

Oliver Ruebenkoenig, Mathematica Kernel Developer, the presenter, managed to give a guided tour through the most beautiful areas of Mathematica. It is not so easy to walk through a platform that has many thousands of functions transformed into ground-breaking technologies in 2 hours; he chose a perfect balance of in-depth sessions giving full explanation on capabilities and implementations of Mathematica 7, a huge release, with overviews, always giving the link to the rich resources in the comprehensive Wolfram pages-for-users. From dynamic graphics examples to Wolfram Alpha. We had a spirited discussion with the attending Fraunhofer Researchers, from the first-viewers to the advanced mathematica users.

Andreas Kluge, IWS IT, organized the event in a great venue. It starts with the entry, with presentations of the institute's achievents and goes to a perfectly equipped seminar room. Thank you!

But I even got some extras. When I approached and left Dresden, a glistening sun made the colored leaves in the woods golden surfaces and it was the first time that I took time to enjoying a walk through the impressive Altstad and Neustadt of Dresden.

Im a very much looking forward to the next Fraunhofer Mathematica events in Freibug and St Augustin.