Fireside Chat: Wolfram Summer School

First episode of Wolfram Summer School Alum Fireside Chat I am Yi work at the Academic Innovation Support Team at Wolfram Research. I am thrilled to be here with two remarkable alum, John Phyllis. So let's start with a brief introduction with our guest here. Could you share a bit about your background and what drew you to Warfarin Summer School?

Sure. So I think we're both in this first edition of the Alumni Fireside Chats because we're, you know, two. Two of the people from the Wolfram Summer School who then decided to join the company. And we all work on the same team, so it's quite convenient for us to organize this first. But I'm very much looking forward to hearing what lots of other alumni would like to share their stories, too. So before joining Wolfram Research and joining the summer School, originally I started at University of Illinois studying physics. I got interested in physics education. And then after having this interest in physics education and teaching for a while, you know, I always am interested in interesting things going on in science and technology kind of on the side that's sort of beyond what you might be teaching in a particular class. And so because of this interest, you know, I decided that the Wolfram Summer School would be a great place to not only, you know, explore what people are doing in some of these areas, but also this was. So I went to the summer school in 2022. And so that had been an interesting couple of years for people who were teaching. And so I was starting to think, well, you know, I've been on this sort of career trajectory for a little while. Do I want to stay in the classroom at the moment or, you know, do I want to look at some other options that are out there? And so, you know, as a school, it's not only just learning how to work with interesting technology and employ new methods in science, but one thing that I found it really helpful as a working professional was that it was a great networking opportunity and way to see how do projects really come to life. From the initial idea to a completed, this is what we're able to do in three weeks as a way to see how Wolfram Research, as a company, really get stuff done.

So.

So that's sort of my brief history.

So how about you, Ophelias?

So I was actually quite interested in Wolfram for a couple years before applying to the Wolfram Summer School. My background is in human ecology, and I applied for the summer school right after graduating for my bachelor's degree at a school studying human ecology in Maine. And at this while I was, while I was a student, I was really interested in GIS and very interested in, generally speaking, geocomputation and complex systems. And so my interests naturally led me to Wolfram language because of the work that Wolfram does and has done over the last 35 years in complex systems and the functionality that they've added to the Wolfram language for geocomputation. So I was very curious to see whether I could apply my interests in GIS to a project in the Wolfram language to bring together satellite imagery and remote sensing data. And so I applied with the hope to do something computational with geographic data. And, and I'm very pleased with how that turned out. And I, as the project went on and I saw that it was going well, I, I took the opportunity to, to say, well, you know, maybe, maybe there's a, maybe there's a place for me at the company. And, and things, things went along from there.

Yeah. So we will talk more about, like, your story, like, how did you end up working with us? But before that, I want to ask John and Phileas. So, John, you have been teaching for a couple of years, and Phileas before that you were like, study for your bachelor. So how did you learn Warframe summer school as an opportunity?

That's an interesting question. You know, I think I found it on the website when I was looking at just generally what Wolfram as a company was up to. You know, I lived in Champaign, Illinois and had for some time. And this is of course, where the office that I'm currently sitting in now is. And so I'd been familiar with Wolfram Research as a company in Champaign for a while. When I was an undergraduate, I learned how to use the software Mathematica as part of my physics degree. And so I had been interested in the language as something that was very useful for doing various tasks, you know, since I was an undergraduate then. It really wasn't until I was teaching a physics class and had this sort of realization as I was adapting some materials from sort of one of the things that I always liked doing was trying to bring, you know, the university curriculum closer to students who aren't necessarily in, in that degree program. Right. And so as I was adapting some materials, it occurred to me, you know, I used Mathematica when I was learning to do this stuff. Maybe I should actually adapt that along with the rest of the curriculum materials. And so that, that was the thing that really started me on this, this thinking of, oh, well, what is Wolfram up to these days? And So I was just looking around the website and found the summer school as an opportunity. And I'm sure we'll talk some more about the tracks as we go. But, you know, I actually was interested specifically in this, you know, education, innovation, direction, because that was sort of the, the most immediate professional need that I had at the time was, you know, I, I had spent a few years, you know, not really using the language as much as I do, you know, currently or had in the past. And so I, you know, thought that the school would be a great opportunity to, you know, catch myself back up to speed. You know, I had done some porting over of. Of, you know, materials already from, let's say, something that might be taught in university to students who are outside of a degree program but still want to learn those both, you know, conceptual skills, but also the coding aspect of it. And that was really the draw is, you know, the students, after they learn whatever course it is, they're. They're going to have a very concrete skill at the end of it as well that no matter what you're using the language to do, then you know how to use a bit of the language after you've done it, and you can transfer that. So, yeah, that's, that's the sort of meandering path from, you know, I, I had a need in what I was working on to I wonder what Wolfram is up to. I used them when I was learning physics and then finding that the school was an opportunity to see what was new and, and also to. To see what was going on in the company in a larger scale. Yeah, my, My.

My bachelor's degree was very interdisciplinary, and I was, I was looking. I did a lot of data science and programming in my coursework, and I was very interested in tools that would allow me to study interdisciplinary subjects with very little friction. And I came across Wolfram language while taking courses on various mathematical topics because I was just interested in brushing up on some of those subjects and just found that it was an incredibly good fit. And so I got interested in Wolfram as a company from then on and through my expeditionary funds as an undergraduate, I went to the Wolfram Tech conference in 2022. And it was through discussions with people, including John, that I learned about the Wolfram Summer School and decided to apply. And I'm very glad I did.

Yeah. So for two of you before going to Wolfram Summer School, you already have some experience with Wolfram Language, and especially, John, you are trying to use Wolfram language in your teaching. So for the Audience for the context. As Wolfram Summer school we are using a project based approach. So each student, so you will be doing a project consulted with your mentor and our chief project advisor, Stephen Wolfram. And at the end of summer school you will be having something presentable and also be part of your portfolio. So I want to ask you to you have some experience before, but how the project you did in summer school different from the things you did before with Warframe language And what's the, like what's the special experience at summer school and what the challenge you have come through?

Yeah, that. Okay, that's a really great question. How especially things are different than what I'd normally done. So I'm going to share real quick. So one of the nice things at the end of the school is that as you said, it's project based. And so everyone has a finished item at the end of three weeks that then you have a nice write up and it's something that you can say, this is what I did over the course of these three weeks. And so my original introduction to Wolfram language language, as I said, was in the physics department. And so most of what we were using it for was we were using it to solve equations, we were using it to plot things and we were using it to fit models. And that was my introduction to the language. And so then that, that was sort of my idea of oh, this is what the language does. But in fact, so what I wound up working on had actually had more to do with helping students navigate the vast amount of built in data that exists as a part of what you get when you're using the language. So you know, when you're querying WolframAlpha, you know, it's not hallucinating answers, it's going and seeing is there actual data or can I do an actual computation to produce answers? And so I had absolutely no idea or conception that you could use the language for doing graphic user interfaces. Because when I was first using it back as an undergraduate, I had absolute, you know, we didn't, we didn't do that. I had no idea that you could even use it for that. And so as a result of, you know, discussing with. One of the other nice things about the school is that everyone is paired with several mentors in fact, who are, you know, experts in the language and experts in some domain or other. And you know, you get lots of good advice from all the, both developers as well as people who are in other roles that are there and really know the language inside and out and can help point you in the right direction for figuring out how to do things that you didn't know the language could do. And so this was more what I wanted to learn while I was there is okay, how do I use the language for creating interfaces? Because I know, okay, it can do computation, it can do statistics, it can fit models, it can do data science, these sorts of things. But before the school I had absolutely no idea that you could create graphic user interfaces with it. And so I just did a very quick filliosis project I should say looks much more visually attractive than mine, I really like that one. But, but just a very quick user interface for navigating this large amounts of built in data was just a quick project that I did. And another thing that I'll say is advice to people. One of my challenges I think is during that first couple days of the school, you're deciding what your final project is going to be. So when you apply, you indicate things that you're interested in working on, but you really don't decide for sure what you're going to work toward until a couple days into the school after you've had a chance to really sit down with the mentors, talk with them, meet Steven, et cetera. And so one of my mentors suggested, hey, there's this really interesting project in the physics track that you might be interested in. And so we discussed it for a little bit. I said this really sounds like an interesting project. I'm not sure it's a three week project. I think it's like a five or six week project. And so for that reason only, I think I want to stick with this other direction that we've been discussing. But that was one of the challenges is that you do get very good advice from a variety of people as to scoping. How are you going to actually have something that you can finish in three weeks? And so what I decided to work on was I had a pretty clear idea like yes, I think this is definitely doable in three weeks. Whereas this other very interesting idea, I don't know if three weeks would be quite what I want to spend on that and would be a better longer term project at any rate. Um, that, that's my, my brief little bit about that. I'm sure we can go into lots more detail about these as we go, but Filius's project looks much better than mine. So let Phileas show off the, the nice things that came out of, of that year.

Thank you, John, that's very kind of you. I so, so one of the big challenges. Okay, let, let, let me first talk a little bit about my project. I, I worked on a remote sensing packet for the Wolfram language, bringing in remote sensing services and various forms of imagery from NASA from their GIBBS and their Appears services. Both of these are APIs that you can query to get various kinds of imagery. Through Appears, you can get, you can get raw data, and through Gibbs, you can generally get tile services for visualization. So you can use those in geographics when you're making, when you're making maps in the Wolfram language. And when I started the project, I thought, okay, well, there'll probably be some kind of, some documentation that tells us how to make queries to these pages and how to get to the specific data that we want and how we can authenticate to get all of the information and bring it into the Wolfram language. And what I found is that.

I.

Think that was the biggest challenge for me in the actual project because I hadn't really had any experience with interfacing with APIs and bringing the information into the Wolfram languages was honestly really simple. But figuring out the actual, the format for the queries and understanding how to authenticate to a remote service and making sure to, and also keeping track of asynchronous tasks. Because when you request data from the Appeears service, it takes a while for them to process the data and make it available to you. So you have to have some functionality built into the code so that it keeps track of that task and it loads in the updated data once it's finished. So the big part I want to maybe highlight in this project is the Gibbs interface through the Wolfram language. GIBBS is the software that NASA uses for the back end of their Worldview platform. So when you go to the Worldview platform, you have all of these general areas where you can get all sorts of data sets from NASA services. And my goal was, okay, let's bring this into geographics somehow. And in fact, this is, this is wrapped up into a packlet now that you can install and you can do this yourself. But the idea is that you can list through this Gibbs data function all of the available layers that NASA provides through their Gibbs service. And you can get additional information about those layers, and then you can specify that layer as a geoserver through the geographics function to plot maps in any geoprojection and for any range, and then you can sample specific pieces of data from that map, et cetera. So understanding how to interface properly with online services was a great challenge. But also very rewarding. And I think that what made it really special was that my main supervisor and really everybody at Wolfram was just there every time I had a, every, every time I had a question or something to troubleshoot, something, something to do in the Wolfram language that I'd never experienced before. Some questions about any errors that I was running into or, or even just general broader Questions about how AP, how rest APIs work. Someone, someone with expertise in that specific subject could show me their notebooks on their computer and help me troubleshoot and learn this new skill. And so my project moved really fast and much faster than I anticipated that I could really advance it throughout three weeks of the program. And so much so that we ended up submitting the work as a packlet to the packlet repository.

Yeah. So I am impressed by both of your projects, especially failure socialization. So John, you have mentioned, like you get some advice from your mentor, but like in reality you realize it's out of the scope of three weeks. So I wonder at summer school, how did you interact with your mentor for the audience? So each student would assign a mentor or, or a co mentor. You might have like two mentors, but I wonder, like, except for your mentors, how did you get help from, you know, the whole staff team like you, you might get like other help specific, like a command of forefront language or a specific file from like someone who is not your mentor. The rest of your cohorts. So I would love to hear your experience.

Yeah, that's right. So you know, I had two mentors. So depending on the year and the exact numbers of people, we usually have between two and three mentors per student. And so, you know, what this allows is that not only do you have sort of a project committee who can sort of help steer the project in the right direction, but everybody has their own various expertise on things that they've done more of in using the language or maybe even outside the language, just background knowledge in other fields. Right. And so because of that, we really want there to be someone who's very knowledgeable about all sorts of things that you're likely to run into as questions. And so, you know, it's also a very collaborative environment, as you were saying. Right. Is that the mentors. So the mentor meetings, usually the mentors will decide with the students and, you know, provide some feedback of what after, you know, trying for a couple of days, you know, is it better that they, you know, have sort of like a check in meeting like every other day or every day, but then you know, these informal conversations happen constantly, right where, you know, there, there's all the other people at the school who are giving lectures or mentoring other students. And of course, they're very friendly and they know all sorts of things about what, they're experts in the language. And so, you know, any questions that came up about anything. In fact, you know, the mentors all typically know each other pretty well, too. And so sometimes I would have a question, I would ask my mentor, and they would say, well, you know, I don't know as much about this, but you should ask so and so. And so then, you know, okay, so just, you know, at a meal or in between events, you know, just sit down and say, hey, I'm having this problem. What do you know about it? And they can immediately give you very good advice. So, you know, the mentors are there sort of to be the official point of contact for if the student has any questions or concerns. There's someone who is, like, definitely available for them. But really, in fact, people have said it takes a village to do events like the summer school. And this is true is that everyone who is there, whether or not they're your mentor, is there to help and to answer questions and not only provide advice about the projects, but it's also nice meeting people who are at a variety of places in a variety of different careers. And so if you're curious about, hey, you do X, Y or Z as your day job when you're not at the summer school, what's that like? It's a really great way to, as I said, not only just learning about the technical skills, but also just getting a sense for, you know, what's something that I don't have any personal experience like. And, you know, there's all sorts of people with a lot of great experiences from all over the world as well.

I mean, it's interesting. I, I, I don't, I think we had a couple scheduled meetings with my mentor throughout the, the, the three weeks of the program, but we were talking so constantly and interacting. We were interacting just, just throughout the, the, the Anytime that I was at the, like in one of the study rooms or at lunches, there were just conversations bubbling and going on the whole, the whole time throughout the summer school. And I think actually that these lunch conversations are a great feature, a great underrated feature of the Wolfram Summer School because you have these opportunities to have great conversations with many, many different people, students and other faculty at the summer school who have completely different interests. And so you have these very eclectic Conversations that aren't necessarily directly related to your projects, but often will still tie back into the projects because opportunities that weren't immediately apparent through your previous discussions just with your mentor or just discussions with other students in study sessions end up being really relevant to the work that you're doing. And that was certainly the case for me. We initially had just planned to do the Gibbs stuff and. And when that really started moving, we realized, oh well, there's also an opportunity to tie in this other source of data. And it was through discussions at dinners that that really happened.

Yeah. And you know, another thing about the dinner conversations is that Stephen as well likes to pop in for lunches and dinners. Right. So like there's the meetings that are going on with various groups of students as they're having their sort of official project meetings. But when schedule allows, you'll see all sorts of people just in the dining area, as Philia said, having these more informal conversations, which are, I agree, a great feature. In fact, one of the things you asked about challenges earlier. One of the challenges that I had was that I'm one of these people that in order to take all of the advice I'm getting and sort of synthesize that into okay, so this is the chunk of progress. I like to sort of sit and think for a minute without having conversation after having had the conversations. And so one of my challenges was there's so many great conversations and so much advice to be had that like, okay, so let me take an hour and actually implement something and then come back. Right. And so that, you know, stepping away from all those interactions was actually one of the challenging things for me.

Yeah. So since we mentioned about Steven. So one of the special feature is Stephen Wolfram, who is the founder and CEO for Wolfram Research, is the chief project advisor at Wolfram Summer School. So Stephen really take a hands on approach to advise students project. I wonder what's your experience with Stephen during the summer school and also on the first week of the project meeting?

Yeah, so I guess I can start. So I think that the most interesting things that come up are usually around sort of. So like when you're working, at least in my experience when I. When you're working on your own project, you sort of have a roughly clear sense of what the challenges and what you're going to do to try to adjust the challenges are if you don't, then of course Steven's input is really great on that. But for things that you're not thinking about every day, it's great to Get a wider sense of how some of the other projects are going because they'll be small group discussions, as I said. For my particular project, I had chosen to go with this more graphic user interface direction that I had a pretty clear idea of. Ok, so I think this is how this is going to, you know, work in terms of scope and other things. But, you know, there were still surprises that came out of that, I should say. But at any rate, you know, for me personally, I think the most interesting thing about these interactions, both with Stephen and other mentors, is that, you know, none of these projects are happening in isolation. Right. Like, there. There's. Everybody wants to know what everyone else is working on because it's always interesting. And so I think that was my favorite part of those interactions was, you know, even though there's the thing that I was focused on, there's other interesting things that are always going on.

Yeah, I think so. Expanding on that, I think when people applied to the summer school in the year I applied in 2023, I think some of the admitted students weren't sure. Once they. I think some of the students from the application materials had expected that maybe their project suggestions were going to be exactly what they were going to study at the Walrum summer school. And so I. I remember having discussions with other admitted participants where they were telling me, well, it sounds like there's actually more negotiation going on about these project assignments. So am I going to be able to study what I like? Am I going to be able to get to do what I'm interested in? And my experience with that and the feedback that I heard from other students after the initial meetings with mentors and with Stephen was that actually we all ended up with projects that we were quite interested in. We all ended up with projects, projects that were very tailored to the kinds of things that were achievable within the three weeks of the school and also our general research interests. And I think this is because Steven's very careful about tailoring the discussions around project selections to people's interests and identifying challenges that might be hard to anticipate from your perspective, depending on your level of experience with the Wolfram language. So I hadn't expected to do the project that I ended up doing. Exactly. I had some suggestions for things that were actually, in retrospect, I realized much bigger projects that would have taken much longer than three weeks. And having that discussion with Stephen really helped me to narrow it down.

And.

Also really helped to identify exactly what are the components that were going to fit into the project at different stages. And I met with him again partway through the third week of the summer school to just check in on the project discussion. And we sort of just had a casual philosophy conversation about the structure of language. And I think that was a really great opportunity to just get a sense of how. Of how, I guess I don't know how Stephen thinks. I think he's a very interesting character and having random philosophical conversations with him can be very interesting and enriching. So that's another opportunity that I think people might get out of the Wolfram summer school that is not necessarily listed in the summer school description, but is definitely an advantage.

I agree. And one thing that Filius pointed out so Phileas will this year as a mentor get to see some of those conversations from the other side is that in the application you do indicate the sorts of things you're interested in working on. And then exactly as Filia said. Right. So then what happens is there's. All right, so this is what each attendee is interested in doing. There's sort of some things that we've thought about ahead of time that would be also good projects and sort of timely projects, especially in the world of like, let's say quantum computing or large language models for this year. Last year, large language models, of course were very hot topic. And so, you know, we collectively, we had sat down and thought about, okay, so for people who are interested in this area but maybe not sure what they want to do, here are some suggestions. And so then in those initial meetings during that, that first couple days to, usually by the end of that first week, you've got a really clear idea of what it is that the goal is. So during that initial period you will discuss. Okay, so this is what I'm interested in pursuing. And then these are some other suggestions of things that the mentors think are really doable, as Billy has mentioned, within three weeks. And then also something which is very good that Fili has pointed out is anticipating possible roadblocks that might not be obvious from the get go, but might come up. And so in that initial couple of project meetings, this is where that discussion happens to figure out, ok, so given what the person is interested in working on, what's something that they'll have a really nice takeaway at the end of three weeks rather than, you know, just starting on, let's say like a six month, you know, very nebulous thing. Right. So again, the real focus is trying to make sure that at the end of, you know, your time at the school You've got something which is finished. Right. Even if it's only first steps toward doing a larger thing. But there's some chunk of it that has been picked out and, you know, identified as. Okay, so this is the chunk which is doable.

Yeah. I think with the experience of working both at warfarin Summer School 22 and 23, I would say the nature of Wolfram Summer School is really beyond a school. It's more of an innovation lab. So people come to either have some initial idea, or our team, the staff, can help them to shape their idea and test the idea in this lab later on. Of course, three weeks is always a short time, but you test your idea here and then later on you can skip skill at that app in your, you know, profession, professional work, or in your study. Like a lot of people also, you know, go back to their PhD study. I think. Yeah, I would really suggest the student treat it as a lab. And also the, the, the term of student is kind of a little bit confusing because you would think, okay, a school, a student is like learning yield. Like, of course we, we have a lot of questions class, but really our, the, the people attend summer school range from like undergraduate students all the way to professional and also academics. So can you share, can you share more about like, your interaction with like, the, the cohort? Especially given we have such a diverse background, like, based on, you know, geographically and age and subject domain expertise.

Yeah, I mean, so I personally always like to meet people from all over the world. Right. So I like to travel. And so it's always great to meet people who are coming from, you know, quite literally any continent to, you know, discuss interesting ideas. So that's sort of my favorite part. But I agree, I think, you know, student is the sort of default name that we use. But I try to say attendee because when I was there in 2022, one of the students in the cohort was Bob Metcalfe, one of the co inventors of Ethernet. Right. And so there was an interesting project that Bob wanted to work on. And so Bob was there as a student. But this is sort of a student in a different sense. A person who is working on a project is what we mean if someone will say student at the school, because I think that's a somewhat different place in one's career than, let's say, you know, you're an undergraduate who is looking for, you know, good places to start one's career. So, you know, I don't know what word to use. Sometimes we say student, but sometimes we'll try to say attendee to the school. So I definitely agree with that. And then for the other part of.

The.

Project that you're asking, excuse me, the other part that you're asking about was. So, you know, in my cohort there's people who are now at really exciting labs at mit. There's one person in the cohort that I really enjoyed speaking to who is at University of California. There was other people who were coming from having worked in industry at various interesting companies. There were also people who were undergraduates and were thinking about graduate school. Right. So as someone who is, you know, definitely earlier in my career, but had also, you know, finished the whole undergraduate to, you know, starting working, you know, your, your, your job, it was sort of interesting for me to kind of be in the middle of that range of, of experiences. And so my feeling from talking with people who are at the school in any of these different ranges of their experiences is that they all enjoy speaking with everyone else either to, to give advice or also to just see what's new. Right. I mean, even if you've been, you're working in a very high powered career for a very long time, there's lots of stuff out there in the world. And as Felius was saying, just discussing interesting ideas that are coming up and relevant with people who might have had more direct experience with them is always one of the benefits of these informal interactions that happen just from day one up through the end of the school and after is another nice thing too is that there's many people who have been at these schools who, you know, I'll interact with now as part of what I do for, you know, my work here at Wolfram Research is that, you know, there might be some interesting collaboration to do or even just a friendly hello. So that's another aspect that I should definitely mention.

I mean, so I'm very fortunate, I think, to, in most of my educational journey have been in institutions that have always put an emphasis on bringing people together from very diverse backgrounds who have very eclectic interests. And I think this is very much the case at the Wolfram Summer School as well. We had students in my cohort. There was someone from the European Space Agency. There were people from all sorts of interesting institutions around Europe and the Middle east and South America. And I remember having many really interesting conversations with them about their work and their interest. I remember also I had a conversation, I believe one of the students, her name was Fizza Rubab, she worked on a posture estimator using neural networks where you can take an image of a person and then reconstruct a skeleton of the. That estimates their current positions and where their arms and legs are. And I just thought this was one of these. This was just an amazing project. And I had many discussions like this where we would just talk about each other's interests and see how they overlapped and how they connected. And so I think the discussions were inherently very interdisciplinary. And I think that was a. That that's something that I value tremendously in institutions. And I think that's one of the reasons that I ended up actually inquiring about positions at Wolfram.

Yeah. So we get some audience questions. The first one is, my wife has a baby due at the end of June 2024. Congratulations. I live in South Korea. Would you like. I would like to apply to summer school. How would you recommend I join? So this year we have remote participation opportunity. So send us an application. Let me share my screen here. Send your application. We will let you know. Apply now. Yeah.

And another thing that I'd like to say to that question is that, so in my cohort, there's another student, Hassan, who did a really great project on applying computation to teaching calculus. And that year, Hasan was a remote student. And so sometimes life just gets in the way. It's not feasible to physically be in a place for three weeks, but the in person experience, because of all the reasons we were mentioning, is really great. However, life gets in the way. Three weeks is a long time. And so then that was in 2022, that Hasan was a remote student. And then I had joined Wolfram Research and I was mentoring. And then Hasan came in person during 2023 to work on applying computation to teaching data science to students. And so this is something that can sometimes happen is that if you're not sure about can you go in person? Which I highly recommend. Go in person. But, you know, many students, they might first do a remote project, and then based off of them enjoying the experience, they might say, okay, I actually really want to go in person. And we definitely encourage that as well.

Yeah. So let's go for the next question. Can you go over the different tracks? I do want to get some advice from you, too, for people who are confusing about tracks or how to choose a track. For example, John, you have a background in physics, but you choose education, educational innovation track.

So I did. I did. So, you know, it's important to note. So the. The physics track is many. Most of the projects are about the Wolfram physics project, which I can provide a link that we can make sure gets into the chat. Right. So this is a specific model of how one might sort of grow in early universe based off of computation. Right. And so then what many of the projects are about is given this model of how one might do that, where does it connect in interesting ways with other models of how the early universe and cosmology and fundamental physics work. And yes, this is in fact the exact link that I would refer people to. So one of the reasons why for me, there's this very interesting project that to me, for my level of background reading, sounded like this was going to be a five or six week project rather than a three week project. And that's because, you know, this physics project has been going on for a number of years. And so, you know, for the most success in that project, it's nice to sort of be caught up to speed with what's been going on in some of the previous years so that you can pick up and carry on with the next piece of research that makes sense to do and is, you know, attainable, given the progress that's been happening in the previous couple of years. Now, that's not the same thing as having a background. And let's say I was speaking to another student who, so he works on like the conformal bootstrap and also has an interest in studying specifically the strong nuclear force and so doing like lattice quantum chromodynamics. Right. So students who have like a strong knowledge of physics but not aren't necessarily caught up to speed on the physics project. You're also more than welcome to apply and if you want to study something that's more along the lines of the models that you're familiar with, that's also fine. Administratively, we might wind up having you in the science and tech track rather than the physics project track. But that's more of an administrative difference rather than anything that you need to worry about. Just indicate in your application what your level of background and then you are you interested in studying the Wolfram model or are you interested in doing projects that are in the vein of research that maybe you're doing in graduate school, for example? So I think that's an interesting point of clarification that there's a physics track for studying specific physics models and there's also students who have just a more general background in physics and they might be interested in some other track. In my case, I decided to, you know, work on projects that were about physics education. But, you know, I think the same would apply to someone that is interested in A physics problem that, let's say, you know, quantum is another big one. Right. So if you have a background in quantum, you know, you are also more than welcome to work on these sorts of projects. But that's. That's sort of a different starting point and a different target endpoint, let's say. Then you know, you're going to specifically make progress on a particular physical model.

So, Felius, were you in the science and tech track?

Yes, I was in the science and tech track and I applied for the science and tech track because I felt that it was, I guess, maybe the most flexible track for. For science and tech stuff that wasn't necessarily going to lean very strongly either towards the physics project or towards the new kind of science kinds of projects that people have. And I think that I understand that probably in the audience, most of the audience members are going to be people who are interested in Wolfram language and interested in programming. But in case you're not, I just want to stress as well that we've been putting a lot of effort into developing programs and tracks in the Wolfram summer school that are open to people who don't have as much of a background in programming and science, especially the educational innovation and the philosophy and strategy track, which is a new track this summer school. And these are tracks that are designed for people who are coming to the summer school with the goal to design tools for education, to design approaches to education that use a computational perspective. Or people who might be interested in designing strategies for organization, designing management strategies, designing new modes of interactions with large language models or with generative AI, for example, might be people who are interested in that kind of thing, but don't necessarily have very much experience with the Wolfram language, might be quite interested in the philosophy and strategy track, for example. So I want to stress that even though we are, we're a computational company and we focus on computational tools and computational perspectives, we don't expect that students applying to the Wolfram summer school will necessarily be familiar with the detail of computational approaches using Wolfram language. And as a student, you don't also necessarily have to have very much experience with Wolfram language as long as you're willing to be. You're willing to learn and interact with the Wolfram language and, and dedicate yourself through the duration of the project to developing your capacities with your abilities to use the tools. This is a great opportunity and I really encourage people to consider it.

Yeah. So in educational innovation, John has attended the track and Philosophy and strategy is a new track for this year. So as Vilius mentioned, if you're not familiar with Warframe language or coding, but still you might want to learn more about like what's the impact of AI, how to incorporate AI into your like business strategy or kind of like your life design. I think that's a good track. And also Warframe has a lot of people are working on the frontier of technology so how to learn their mindset, their strategy and the philosophy, I think that's a good opportunity.

And for our fifth track I put in a link that we can get to our audience there of something that was in the NKS and ruliology track as well. So this was original research that.

Is.

Definitely in the pre print phase. I'm not sure when they're going to publish but at any rate there is some really interesting progress on a novel mathematical problem. So if you're a fan of tilings, there's some open questions in the world of non periodic tilings. And so one of the projects in that new kind of science and ruleology track, you know, had a really, really great result that again I think people are always surprised what can actually be done in three weeks. And so you know, that's also a track that if you're interested in sort of pure math and maybe are as Felix was saying, less interested, less experienced I should say in the computational aspect of these things. But you want to learn and there's some interesting problems that you want to study. I would say that that's the track that you should probably apply to first.

So we get a follow up question about what's the process for applying to scholarship for remote attend. So after we go through your application, our coordinator will reach out to you for interview and then after that if you are qualified for a scholarship, we will send you the scholarship application form. And another question is as a student, how will I be supported throughout my stay there? What kind of help is offered during the projects?

Yeah, so as we were saying a bit before, basically every day there are a variety of avenues out there. So we have a platform. We usually use Discord for the last few years as a other years we've used Slack. So it just depends on the year which platform we use. But there'll be channels that people can communicate asynchronously. So this is also nice for remote students as a way to have some of these informal conversations and the so so that's always available and then if you are there in the in person venue then of course people are always at meals together and walking around campus together. And so this is available. Then we've also got people who are there, not only your mentors, but other staff who are just there, you know, in case anything comes up that, you know, for example, trying to think of what. What a maybe slight, slightly amusing version of this would be. So, for example, if you're eating the food there on campus and it's the third week and you're thinking, oh, you know, I'm really craving X, Y or Z, who's been around to some of the restaurants to, you know, meet my craving of what food I'd like to get around the area. You know, there's people who have either been to the area before or have spent the last few weeks exploring. And you know, that that sort of informal support is also there as well as the. The more formal channels that we have.

Yeah. So each student will be connected with one or two mentor. Your mentor or instructor will be your official contact point of your projects. And on the first week, you will have, depending on the track. So the. The first three tracks, Physics Project, Science and Tech. NKS will have group project meeting with Stephen and with your mentor. Education, Educational Innovation and Strategy and Philosophy are similar organizations. So, John, you can talk a bit about. We have a different style of group meetings based on the track. And then besides that, you can always get informal support from staff who are not your mentor.

Yeah. So as you was saying, for the Educational Innovation and Philosophy and strategy tracks. So partly for logistical reasons, but also for another reason that I'll mention, we organize the project meetings for those a little bit differently. So if we, you know, there's only one Stephen Wolfram. And so to, you know, choose an order for doing these things. We don't want it to get too late into the school before we've had a lot of really productive project meetings. Right. And so if the bottleneck there is, well, there's only so much time in the day, and Stephen can't be in three meetings at once. What we do for the Educational Innovation and the Philosophy and strategy track is, is that those will have meetings with mentors first so that you can get started right away on a direction. And then later on there's the opportunity to do the, you know, meeting Stephen and discussing projects and these sorts of things. Now, the other reason, aside from just the logistical, there's only so much time in the day is that also for, you know, the physics project or for some of these other things, you know, Steven, you know, has more that he wants to like, oh, there's this one detail about the code that you might write that, you know, that might be good to have some input or a discussion about. Whereas for some of these other tracks, you know, figuring out some of this direction of those details, a lot of times we can figure that out in those initial meetings. And then the project meeting is more about, okay, so this is what we've decided. And then as a sanity check, Stephen, what's your input? And so for a combination of logistical, plus some of the nitty gritty input on, oh, you should do this code or not that code, it tends to work better if we organize them just a little bit different in terms of the chronology for those two tracks.

Yeah, thanks. So, since we have, like, eight minutes left, I want to talk about the impact of summer school on your career path. Like, obviously, John, summer school for you is like a tipping point, and you pivot your career, and for failures through summer school, you end up work at Wolfram Research, entering the tech industry. So I would like to hear more about your experience in terms of, like, how summer school influenced your career.

Sure. So I'll try to keep this brief because you mentioned that we're short on time. So I think there's two useful aspects for it. From the part of my career that I was. So I had been thinking about, you know, do I want to stay on my current career path or do I want to explore other options? So getting that information and that firsthand sense of what it would be like was really valuable to me. And then the other thing which is helpful is that, you know, outside of university, it's not necessarily trivial to be able to have a substantial body of work that you do that is sort of the changing of direction. Right. I mean, people manage to do it, but it's very convenient to go to a program where, you know, whether or not I decide to stay directly in education or whether I'm interested in going in this other area and eventually working for Wolfram Research. Either way, I'm going to do something which is useful to me, and, you know, it's an opportunity to sit down and, you know, do a project that is a nice way to segue sort of away from the usual thing that you might be doing. And I think for people who are a little bit further along in their career, I want to point out that's useful. Right. Is that, you know, having something that you've finished is a really nice way both for yourself and to sort of show to others is like, okay, I'm thinking about switching what I'm doing here.

I would say that it's been, I mean it's been a huge change and a huge opportunity for me. I think that the summer school is also an amazing opportunity to get a sense of the kinds of culture and the kinds of cultures and the kind of ethos that are represented in tech spaces. Not because, I mean you get a sense of the kinds of culture that you can find, that's that at Wolfram, but you also get a sense of other people coming from different tech spaces and their senses of how things go in different companies. So I think it's a great introduction to the tech sector. And then I mean it's been really amazing in several ways because I get to work on subjects that I find interesting. I get to, I get to study, I get to essentially I get to learn every day at my job. And that's something that I know I wouldn't find in every position, including even in the tech sector I think. And it's something I'm really grateful for and something that. I think it's something that's very precious in the context. I mean also another thing maybe just to, to touch on is that at the moment there's a lot of uncertainty around being able to, to find work, especially for young people in the tech sector and in, in many other industries as well. And so having a, having a pathway for me straight after graduating, having a pathway into, into a tech position and being able to, to rely on my connections at Wolfram from the summer school to build that network has been a really impactful aspect of my experience.

Yeah, I would agree there are a lot of challenges going on to getting a job in the tech industry. But I think summer school can really help you get a connection networking and also help you build the portfolio because you will have a project just like Phileas showed the community post. So like you can easily send a link to people to show what you have done, what you are capable of. Actually you get another question about like the application. So when, so currently the question is when all the slots has been filled, do you send the application to unaccepted applicants? So basically currently we are still open for the application and we are doing a rolling basis application. If you get accepted we will send you a letter and then help walk you through the registration. For those who are unaccepted we will probably send all the rejection email. Sometimes we would invite you to apply next year for most of case. So that will be sending out like late June. So currently we're still open for both the in person opportunities for all the tracks and also the remote track. So we have three minutes left. So can two of you just give one or two short sentence about like your suggestion to applicants or upcoming students?

Yeah. So I would say in general find ways that you can make yourself stand out. So that's true both of the application and in terms of the project that you decide to do for the school. I think that's the short but sweet. We could elaborate on that in the future maybe. But you know, find ways to make yourself stand out. And having a project at the end of the three weeks is a great way to do that.

And I would say make sure to be broad in your in your project proposals and pick subjects that you would actually be interested in studying and then in practice be flexible in terms of how you want to implement that project when you actually come to the summer school.

Yeah. Thank you both. So for the audience, if you have further questions you can email to summerorefriend.com we will address your question through email And I think for the upcoming live stream we will get more summer school alum to talk about their experience. If you have like additional question or if you want to hear more about like someone with the background similar to you, stay tuned. We will post on our LinkedIn and our YouTube channel. So thanks for everyone joining the live stream today and thank you John Phillius. We will say we will see everyone.

Next time and we hope at the school.

Yes.

Yeah.

Cheers everyone.