After a great few days in Dublin with the Enlivened Design team, on Thursday night I flew to Zurich. These days I generally fly from Zurich as a) there are more flight options, b) the train to get there - while longer than to Geneva - is often more direct and c) the trains back home tend to run later. (Living near Neuchatel I can actually fly from Geneva, Basel, Bern or Zurich; depending on the destination these other options sometimes make sense.)
When I'd booked the flights to Dublin earlier in the year, Zurich was the most sensible choice. A few weeks ago I was asked to present at an AI event in Lausanne (actually Renens) that is part of Swiss {ai} Weeks called Panoramai: Geneva is much closer to Lausanne but it was too late to change route (the best I could have done is to take a connecting flight from Zurich to Geneva, which just feels wrong, and in any case would have arrived far too late to be useful).
In general getting from Zurich to Lausanne at the time I arrived (9:45pm) was very doable, but somehow I fell on engineering works between Zurich and Olten. Which meant the last train was at 9:46pm. I considered various options and ended up booking a hotel room near Zurich main station, so I could be up at 5:30am to take the first train to Renens at 6:04am.
It was a very surreal feeling to be passing through Neuchatel, for once, especially so early in the morning. I fought my instincts and managed to stay on the train.
The event was held at a great location right by Renens station: a design studio and events space called HyperAktiv. I arrived there at 8:25am - perfect timing for the 8:30am kick-off. I was very happy to meet the owner of the space - and a passionate user of Autodesk Fusion - Raphaël Lutz.
By complete chance I met an old friend and former Autodesk colleague, Raphaël Racine, and by design I also met my son Kalan (whose middle name is Raphaël - do you see the pattern, yet?) whom I'd asked to come along. He lives really close by in Ecublens, so it was a nice chance to hang out.
The host of the event - and the person who'd invited me - was Raphaël Briner.
I was part of the second session of the day, which talked about the application of agents across domains. It was quite a heterogeneous group - I was joined by Ashwin Mudalier from Mastra, who builds an agent framework for Typescript devs, and Alexandre De Dommelin from Paop.io, who uses agentic AI for cybersecurity (part of me worries this will be the largest growth area for AI tools over the coming years), and our host was Alberto-Giovanni Busetto from On Venture Studio. It was nice to be meet some other people not called Raphaël.
I'd been asked to prepare a 4-minute overview of my team's research, so I kicked off the session by presenting that.
Having my son in the audience meant I could get a lot of photos of me talking.
Our research into building embodied virtual agents to explore architectural and urban spaces seemed to resonate with the audience - just based on some of the questions I had at the end of the panel - but this was definitely not my usual audience. Which made for a nice change.
I presented one of the demos from my recent AU class.
Afterwards we went into the panel discussion. Alberto-Giovanni did a great job of managing the discussion, especially considering how very different our respective fields were.
Here's a nice selfie taken by our host:
Considering my relative lack of sleep over the preceding week I chose not to stay all the way until the end of the event: I took the train back to Neuchatel with a Raphaël (Racine) and carried on to my local station, where the sunlight was streaming down the steps at just the right angle for this photo.
Now that I'm back in the saddle I'm going to be heads-down preparing for our next big event: an internal, Research-wide planning meeting in Portland that's preceded by an external event at Carnegie Mellon that my team is supporting. I'll talk more about those in the coming weeks.
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