What are some interesting uses of MATLAB?

Matlab is a full stack development environment. So you can use it, if you are willing to write some small batch/shell scripts, or small wrapper functions in application-specific languages, for pretty much anything (HDL/embedded coding to real-time image scene analysis to vision or verification). The downside is speed, the upside is no need to worry about stack and memory management.

1. Matlab as the control environment for running application suites (Ansys APDL/Maxwell/MSC ADAMS/AutoCAD software for automated electromechanical design optimization). All of these application packages support some form of batch processing. Let's take Ansys as an example - I use Matlab to run multiple parametric iterations, generating APDL script for every run, reading and analyzing results to determine which direction the parameters need to swing (using a defined search algorithm, say depth-first). Once the optimal electromechanical parameters are established, I used AutoCAD's AutoLISP interface to automatically generate the design files I needed. This strategy seems to work with most design/FEA software out there.

2. Webscraping - Matlab is great for medium sized numerical dataset analysis. It also has an internal browser (opera-based) tool that can be used to collect html page source in strings. So you can scrape using that as well (but you have to create your own URL/context parser which can take time). Instead of using the internal tool, I called the shell-version of the lynx browser. Lynx, as you might know, is a text-only browser, so it returns well-structured strings which have been preformatted. At that point, I only needed to create context identifying functions (in m-script) to identify the context of a link.

3. Websearch - Basic idea is the same as for scraping, only you are talking with google or bing servers. This might not work all the time (google places some restrictions on bots scraping their search results, so I browser-masqueraded using Lynx), but it did work while I used CMU servers.

4. Create web-bots.. or honeypots (matlab lets you access tcpip or udp stacks)

5. Create captcha-beating tools - using the image processing toolbox and the java hack to acquire screenshots.

6. Windows automation - Using Matlab in combination with AutoIt or Java, where Matlab is triggered using image/text/.. events to create certain functionality. You can even use matlab to create on-the-fly scripts for intelligent automation. This is probably one of the most powerful combinations possible, since you acquire a full control over your environment (mouse clicks, keyboard entries, opening/max/minimizing windows..).

7. Automated tracking of webpages (even protected-content webpages - using image processing tools). Text embedded in images can be OCR'ed using HP's tesseract software

8. Extracting textual content of protected portable documents - Screenshots+image processing+tesseract

9. Giving a voice to your computer (text-to-speech systems) - By wrapping Alan Black's Festival or festvox packages.. The application here was to use NLP to generate context based responses. The Stanford parser can be integrated with matlab pretty easily (since they give you the java binaries and objects)

10. Controlling embedded hardware, external devices - Basically using the Serial Tx/Rx capabilities of matlab. I have used Serial-to-XXX converters to control devices that use XXX comm protocols without serious limitations (except bandwidth). You can control, say atmel/microchip PIC mcus using matlab (and also fpgas)

10.1 Controlling wireless devices using radio/bluetooth/X'bee SPP. I believe I recall seeing some WiFi hacks with matlab, but never tried them. Some radio devices can also be controlled using matlab but they also rely on a serial backend.

11. Instrumentation control - Replacing the whole National Instruments LabWindows/LabView suite - Matlab has this instrument control toolbox which allows GPIB communications (along with serial). A familiarity with SCPI and you can recreate almost everything that Labwindows let's you do.

12. Hooking up USB/etc cameras using a simple matlab interface (Image acquisition toolbox). I have an automated real-time face detection scheme running in my office hooked up to a cheap webcam. Note that some manufacturers have drivers that provide seamless interfaces (you can call all internal functions of the camera)

13. Server side app deployment - I don't have any personal experience with this, but a sales guy was telling me about how you can write scripts that deploy on servers and can generate dynamic content.

Matlab uses java and integrates it very well, so you will find people attacking matlab from that end (Yair Altman's Undocumented Matlab site goes into the details). There's a bunch of stuff on symbolic math (using a Maple backend initially, but now it's the ugly mupad), automated document generation (ppt, doc, xls), circuit simulation, virtual reality, app stores (?!), etc that matlab also supports but I haven't worked extensively with those. One of the primary usage scenarios for matlab is its extensive use in the control systems engineering world - so I don't go there. (Simulink=The Horror! The Horror! imnsho).

I basically like disgusting my software friends and colleagues with what I manage to do with matlab,. :D

The point here is, Matlab enables conversion and visualization of datasets to matrix algebra very easily; and that's where its power really lies. So if you are familiar with formal algebra, you can use matlab to convert the cloud to your preferred format.