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Mike Croucher
Mike Croucher
Last activity on 8 Nov 2024 at 17:15

MATLAB Expo sessions on Open Source

Next week is MATLAB EXPO week and it will be the first one that I'm presenting at! I'll be giving two presentations, both of which are related to the intersection of MATLAB and open source software.
  • Open Source Software and MATLAB: Principles, Practices, and Python Along with MathWorks' Heather Gorr. We we discuss three different types of open source software with repsect to their relationship to MATLAB
  • The CLASSIX Story: Developing the Same Algorithm in MATLAB and Python Simultaneously A collaboration with Prof. Stefan Guettel from University of Manchester. Developing his clustering algorithm, CLASSIX, in both Python and MATLAB simulatenously helped provide insights that made the final code better than if just one language was used.
There are a ton of other great talks too. Come join us! (It's free!) MATLAB EXPO 2024
Mike Croucher
Mike Croucher
Last activity on 15 Sep 2024

Who will be at SC24?

Hot off the heels of my High Performance Computing experience in the Czech republic, I've just booked my flights to Atlanta for this year's supercomputing conference at SC24.
Will any of you be there?
One of the privileges of working at MathWorks is that I get to hang out with some really amazing people. Steve Eddins, of ‘Steve on Image Processing’ fame is one of those people. He recently announced his retirement and before his final day, I got the chance to interview him. See what he had to say over at The MATLAB Blog The Steve Eddins Interview: 30 years of MathWorking
The latest release is pretty much upon us. Official annoucements will be coming soon and the eagle-eyed among you will have started to notice some things shifting around on the MathWorks website as we ready for this.
The pre-release has been available for a while. Maybe you've played with it? I have...I've even been quietly using it to write some of my latest blog posts...and I have several queued up for publication after MathWorks officially drops the release.
At the time of writing, this page points to the pre-release highlights. Prerelease Release Highlights - MATLAB & Simulink (mathworks.com)
What excites you about this release? why?
On Valentine's day, the MathWorks linkedIn channel posted this animated gif
and immeditaely everyone wanted the code! It turns out that this is the result of my remix of @Zhaoxu Liu / slandarer's entry on the MATLAB Flipbook Mini Hack.
I pointed people to the Flipbook entry but, of course, that just gave the code to render a single frame and people wanted the full code to render the animated gif. That way, they could make personalised versions
I just published a blog post that gives the code used by the team behind the Mini Hack to produce the animated .gifs https://blogs.mathworks.com/matlab/2024/02/16/producing-animated-gifs-from-matlab-flipbook-mini-hack-entries/
Thanks again to @Zhaoxu Liu / slandarer for a great entry that seems like it will live for a long time :)
Many of the examples in the MATLAB documentation are extremely high quality articles, often worthy of attention in their own right. Time to start celebrating them! Today's is how to increase Image Resolution using deep learning
https://uk.mathworks.com/help/deeplearning/ug/single-image-super-resolution-using-deep-learning.html
Mike Croucher
Mike Croucher
Last activity on 22 Oct 2024

Multiple AIs in the chat playground

When I want to understand a problem, I'll often use different sources. I'll read different textbooks, blog posts, research papers and ask the same question to different people. The differences in the solutions are almost always illuminating.
I feel the same way about AIs. Sometimes, I don't want to ask *THE* AI...I want to ask a bunch of them. They'll have different strengths and weaknesses..different personalities if you want to think of it that way.
I've been playing with the AI chat arena and there really is a lot of difference between the answers returned by different models. https://lmarena.ai/?arena
I think it would be great if the MATLAB Chat playgroundwere to allow the user to change which AI they were talking with.
What does everyone else think?
I recently wrote about the new ODE solution framework in MATLAB over the The MATLAB Blog The new solution framework for Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) in MATLAB R2023b » The MATLAB Blog - MATLAB & Simulink (mathworks.com)
This was a very popular post at the time - many thousands of views. Clearly everyone cares about ODEs in MATLAB.
This made me wonder. If you could wave a magic wand, what ODE functionality would you have next and why?
The way we've solved ODEs in MATLAB has been relatively unchanged at the user-level for decades. Indeed, I consider ode45 to be as iconic as backslash! There have been a few new solvers in recent years -- ode78 and ode89 for example -- and various things have gotten much faster but if you learned how to solve ODEs in MATLAB in 1997 then your knowledge is still applicable today.
In R2023b, there's a completely new framework for solving ODEs and I love it! You might argue that I'm contractually obliged to love it since I'm a MathWorker but I can assure you this is the real thing!
I wrote it up in a tutorial style on The MATLAB Blog https://blogs.mathworks.com/matlab/2023/10/03/the-new-solution-framework-for-ordinary-differential-equations-odes-in-matlab-r2023b/
The new interface makes a lot of things a much easier to do. Its also setting us up for a future where we'll be able to do some very cool algorithmic stuff behind the scenes.
Let me know what you think of the new functionality and what you think MathWorks should be doing next in the area of ODEs.
Mike Croucher
Mike Croucher
Last activity on 17 Jan 2022

Help us help you: Post your code

Every day, thousands of people ask questions on MATLAB Answers and many of these are about their code. Questions such as “How can I make this faster?”, “Why do I get this error message?” or “Why don’t I get the answer I expect?”. There’s often one crucial thing missing though – the code in question!

Most of the people who answer questions on MATLAB Answers are volunteers from the community. They are answering your questions for fun, to learn more about MATLAB or just because they like to be helpful. This is even true for people such as me who are MathWorks members of staff. It’s not part of my role to patrol the community, looking where I can help out. I do it because I like to do it.

Make it easier to help me help you.

Imagine you’re a volunteer, looking for something interesting to answer. What kind of questions are you more likely to dig into and help an anonymous stranger figure out?

In my case, I almost always focus on problems that I can easily reproduce. I rarely know the answer to any question off the top of my head and so what I like to do is start off with the problem you are facing and use the various tools available to me such as the profiler or debugger to figure it out. This is the fun of it all for me – I almost always learn something by doing this and you get helped out as a side effect!

The easier I can reproduce your issue, the more likely I am to get started. If I can’t reproduce anything and the answer isn’t immediately obvious to me I’ll just move onto the next question. One example that demonstrates this perfectly is a case where someone’s MATLAB code was running too slowly. All of the code was available so I could run it on my machine, profile it and provide a speed-up of almost 150x.

It's not always feasible or desirable to post all of your code in which case you need to come up with a minimal, reproducible example. What’s the smallest amount of code and data you can post that I can run on my machine and see what you see? This may be more work for you but it will greatly increase your chances of receiving an answer to your question.