Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Wolfram Summer School

Alumni

Federico Dradi

Technology and Innovation

Class of 2017

Bio

Federico Dradi holds a PhD in physics from the University of Göttingen, Germany, and completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Ferrara, Italy. He was also a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford, England. During his PhD studies, he investigated the phenomenology of several dark matter models. This experience enabled him to work with experimental data, perform simulations of physics events and deal with the analytical aspect of dark matter—the existence of a non-luminous matter in the universe.

After his PhD, he welcomed the challenge of working as a volunteer at an orphanage in Cusco, Peru. In South America, he was exposed to the richness of new cultural history and diversity. There, he experienced the world through hands-on work by helping provide daily living assistance for families with many children and orphans.

He now works for Xerox GmbH, a global leader in transformational customer service solutions to many of the world’s best known brands. Beside his normal work, which requires problem-solving skills and frequent customer correspondence, he supervises the Italian group of the Basic Written Administration division. In trying to live by the saying, “Do one thing every day that scares you,” Federico is a curious and hard-working person who enjoyed attending the Wolfram Summer School 2017.

Computational Essay

Bank Statements Analysis in Mathematica »

Project: Analysis of the US Government Foreign Assistance

Goal of the project:

We aim at analyzing data from the website foreignassistance.gov, the US government’s main tool for improving transparency in US foreign assistance spending. In the range of years 2014–2016, we want to study the US foreign assistance investments by the government’s main agencies in several categories for a sample of countries. Moreover, we want to display how the investments are distributed in Peru, Jordan and Ethiopia.

Summary of work:

After having imported data via the API, we have selected the important information by using the main functions for data analysis and data visualization, such as Association, Dataset, Select, Table, MapAt, ListLogPlot, PieChart and BarChart. Note that the last three functions were employed for displaying our results.

Results and future work:

In the first part of our analysis, we have seen how investments of a given agency have been distributed through the different categories. This investigation has been done for all the countries of the studied sample, and the results have been displayed via charts. In the second part of our analysis, we have focused on Peru, Jordan and Ethiopia. We have shown how the investments in a specific category come from all the considered agencies in 2014–2016. Finally, we have compared the US government’s different aid to Peru, Jordan and Ethiopia. An increase of the American financial support to Ethiopia in the last two years has been observed. On the contrary, a decrease of such financial support to Jordan and Peru has been highlighted. Effective pie charts have shown how much of the total aid has been given to each category for these countries. Note that our codes have been written to be independent from the range of years under consideration.