Autodesk Research
-
During the next Dynamo Office Hours – being held on March 9th, 2023 at 1pm EST – Rhys Goldstein and I will be joining Tiana Dame, Sol Amour and Jacob Small to talk about "Packages of Note", which will include an introduction to the Space Analysis and VASA packages. I'm sure it's going to be a fun event – it's always a blast catching up with Sol and Jacob – and a good chance to learn about a few Dynamo packages developed and maintained by Autodesk. The focus will be on introducing the various packages – rather than going into…
-
There's been a lot of talk in the news lately about 15-minute cities. This – along with the accompanying term, 20-minute neighbourhoods – is derived from a proposal by the urbanist Carlos Moreno to make cities and neighbourhoods that have all the important amenities accessible in a 15-20 minute walk. Carlos makes a number of points that resonate greatly with our own architectural-scale efforts: We need to rethink cities around the four guiding principles that are the key building blocks of the 15-minute city. First, ecology: for a green and sustainable city. Second, proximity: to live with reduced distance to…
-
As mentioned in last week's post, I spent most of it in Toronto. I was there for an "offsite" meeting for our research area, although admittedly as most of the attendees were local – Toronto is a major research hub for us, hence the choice for it to host this meeting – we could probably have called it an "onsite". I won't go into the specifics of the discussions here, of course, but suffice it to say that there were lots of sticky notes and design thinking tools (we use a methodology called LUMA at Autodesk) being used. We also…
-
Some huge news was dropped by the Autodesk Tandem team, last week. Their Facility Monitoring feature is now available to Tandem customers as a Beta release. This is effectively the culmination of more than a decade of our research into contextualising sensor (IoT) data inside 3D (mainly BIM) environments. It started through Project Dasher in late 2009, which – passing by our work on Dasher 360 from 2016 – led to the creation of the APS (formerly Forge) viewer's Data Visualization Extension in 2020-21. In this latest phase, Dasher has inspired the Tandem team to build out Dasher-like features to…
-
My first trip of 2023 has taken me back to Canada, to the fine city of Toronto. We have a team meeting there for our area of research which I'm really looking forward to: we've had several months of preparatory work – performed asynchronously – so it's almost certainly overdue that we all get together. In any case it's a timely way to kick off the year. I cut short a ski weekend (one of many, living in Switzerland – no-one should feel bad for me) to hop on a bus and take a few connecting trains to get to…
-
Today is my first day back after a much-needed 3-week break. For most of that period we were up in the mountains, and split our time between snowboarding and snowshoeing with the puppy. We had some unseasonably mild weather in the Alps, over the break, but we did still manage to make the most of what snow there was.During the course of the break, I spent some time thinking back on 2022 and looking ahead to 2023. For me, 2022 has brought a significant amount of change and uncertainty, between changes in role, escalating climate issues or the war in…
-
On Wednesday I came across to Dublin for the latter part of the APS Accelerator being held, here. Jaime Rosales – who has been here with Sergio Leone and Adam Nagy from the APS Developer Advocacy and Support team – has taken some lovely pictures during this trip. The better ones in this post were taken by him. I unfortunately just missed Peter Schlipf – who was here for the first half of the week – which was a great shame. Here are some pictures of the city. We were mostly staying in the Hilton Garden Inn, so to get…
-
Rhys Goldstein, an Autodesk Research colleague with whom I've had the great pleasure of collaborating on various projects, over the years, has written an excellent explainer article that has just been published in Towards Data Science. This is intended as a companion to our paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, something I talked about in this recent post. Firstly, though, a quick shout-out to Zach Kron, who kindly allowed an image of one of his watercolours to be used in the article; one he created with the help of Dynamo and the Space Analysis package, which implements…
-
There's a lot going on with AI at Autodesk, these days: most of our engineering teams have developers who are exploring the potential for AI with respect to product features. For instance, the AutoCAD team has developed and released a number of features driven by machine learning: AutoCAD 2023's Markup Assist and My Insights features – the latter with its cool Macro Advisor capability – are all powered by ML. I'm less familiar with ML-powered features in Revit and Fusion 360, but I know they have teams focusing on exploring the benefits ML might bring to their users. All this…
-
Now that my head is briefly back above water following Autodesk University 2022 and some time off with the family, I thought I'd revisit the Dar 5m Smart Bridge project to share some of the things I learned about it during AU in New Orleans. As a reminder, I was not heavily involved in the building of the bridge itself – although I did track it with great interest from a distance – as my role really only came into play in the final stages of the project, when we were looking to get the data from the bridge into…