Autodesk Research
-
This milestone has crept up on me, over the last few months. I guess I've been putting off thinking – and blogging – about it. Earlier this year we made the decision to wind down development and support of the time-series database that serves as the back-end for Project Dasher. (Fun fact: this project was originally codenamed Blitzen – the name of a reindeer that was part of the "back-end" for Dasher on Santa's sleigh – and eventually became known internally as Data 360.) Anyway, it was time to wind it down, both because of the widespread availability of alternative…
-
After a really interesting few days in Delft at CAAD Futures 2023, on Friday morning my daughter and I headed to Amsterdam on our way to Munich. The main goal of visiting Amsterdam was – of course – to visit the MX3D bridge, particularly as it's due to be decommissioned later this year. (I know, I know: it doesn't seem as though the bridge has been there long, but the permit was a limited one – appropriate for a temporary art installation – and there seems to have been some resistance to the project from a local heritage preservation group.)…
-
On Tuesday night my daughter and I headed to Geneva to hop on a plane to Amsterdam Schipol. We were quite lucky with our arrival: we were able to get out of the airport and onto a train to Delft within 20 minutes. On arriving in Delft we headed to our Airbnb, managing to avoid being hit by bicycles. We came across some interesting structural work being down on a nearby bridge. After dropping our bags, we headed out for dinner with my old friend Pete Storey, who kindly popped over from Utrecht to meet us for a bite and…
-
Just a quick note to say that you can now log in to the Autodesk University website (this guidance has changed, please see below) from today – June 23rd – to see the status of your class proposals and learn whether or not they were accepted for AU 2023 in Las Vegas. I was very happy to learn that the two proposals I submitted this year were accepted: I'm sure there'll be an email sent very shortly, but I just thought I'd share this in case anyone's impatient to find out their situation relative to classes at this year's event.…
-
For the last few years I've been on the scientific committee for a conference called CAAD Futures. My involvement began with the 2021 edition of the conference: I reviewed several papers submitted to the conference and also ended up being invited to talk during one of the conference's workshops (it was called Beyond generative Computer Aided-Architectural/Urban Design (CAAD/CAUD) and was hosted by Todor Stojanovski). That last edition was held in Los Angeles – and the workshop hosted in Stockholm – but I only participated remotely. This year's edition is being held in Europe, at TU Delft in the Netherlands, from…
-
Our resident spatial-analyst-in-chief, Rhys Goldstein, has gone and done it again. After his very well-received Medium post explaining grid-based pathfinding was published in Towards Data Science, Rhys has now had a follow-up post published that explains our work on visibility. And it's fantastic! Assessing visibility and pathfinding in 2D and 3D spaces are really cornerstones of our work to assess how occupant-centric prospective building designs are likely to be. This is a critical capability for us in our day-to-day work, but it's also very interesting from an algorithmic perspective and Rhys's article helps create awareness of these techniques with people…
-
The CFP period for this year's AU has simply flown by – mainly because it's turned out to be a busy period between personal milestones and work travel – and today (May 15th) is the last day to submit your proposals for the event. Over the weekend I went ahead and finalised last-minute changes to mine and clicked submit. The titles (as shown above) are: Monitoring and visualizing data from the MX3D and Dar Smart Bridges Channeling Minecraft to analyze architectural spaces with VASA and Dynamo Both are variations on proposals I submitted for last year's event (but obviously weren't…
-
Last week I was in Dallas, Texas, for TechX 2023, Autodesk's annual internal event for technical and design staff. As the technical content shared at the event is company confidential, I'm mostly sharing pictures of people I had the good fortune to hang out with, during the course of the week. There was quite a bit of "real" work going on, too, though, so hopefully you won't come away with the impression that it was just a week-long party. Ahem. As there's no direct flight to Dallas from Switzerland, I chose to fly via Heathrow from Geneva on the Sunday…
-
I'm packing my bags soon for another trip across the pond for our annual, Autodesk-internal geekfest, TechX 2023. This year's event is being held in Dallas, Texas, a city I haven't visited in perhaps 20 years. I'm sure a lot has changed – we'll see! Photo credit: Robert Hensley, CC license. In any case TechX isn't about the venue – or even about the technical content, which, while often really interesting, is also watchable remotely during and after the event – as much as the chance to (re)connect with people. In that sense it's similar to the Autodesk University experience,…
-
Today is a big day for Autodesk Research – and the Dasher team, in particular – in that the path started back in 2009 has now led to Autodesk Tandem integrating core IoT-centric capabilities in their production digital twin offering. Congratulations to my old Dasher colleague, Hali Larsen, and the rest of the Tandem team! This is all really exciting. 🙂 (For more information about the historical connection between Dasher and Tandem, this post from back in January might be helpful.) But anyway – today is all about Tandem. The feature is looking really good, presumably at least partly thanks…