Autodesk Research
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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On Friday I hopped on a train to Zurich to attend the AI+X Summit 2022 event – organised by the ETH AI Center – which was co-located with the ETH Entrepreneur Club's Launch event. It was a lovely autumn day, and the colours were even on display in Zurich's Oerlikon district. The event was held at Stage One, an event space a short walk from the Oerlikon train station. I was mainly there for the AI+AEC workshop, but there were a number of mainstage presentations and exhibits by startups and larger companies involved in AI. The workshops were held upstairs,…
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That's it for another whirlwind AU! This year's AU was a very different one for me. Normally I'm delivering a class or two and end up spending several hours in meetings with customers – I almost never get to spend time in the Expo. In contrast I spent almost all of my time at this year's event in the Expo standing on or talking about a bridge, so I can't give any meaningful commentary about the broader event, sadly. One thing I will say – beyond whatever takeaways people have related to the change of venue (New Orleans over Las…
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In a recent post I hinted at a really impressive project that is being unveiled today in the exhibit hall of AU 2022. (My involvement was as usual pretty minor, primarily relating to data visualization, while the really impressive work was around designing and printing it.) The project is a 5 metre long single-cantilevered (in terms of the printing – it's supported at both ends when in use) smart bridge, 3D-printed from recycled PETG and glass fibre in our Boston Technology Center for Dar. Here's a video shared via LinkedIn that describes the project and a photo of Steve Blum…
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In a recent post, I mentioned that I've been asked to help lead our efforts in a particular area of research. I was deliberately vague at the time. Now, with Autodesk University 2022 around the corner, it seems a good time to say more about this. I hope it stimulates some interesting discussions at the event. As a company, one of Autodesk's core interests is to enable the design and creation of healthier, safer, more resilient spaces. We want to explore tools for designers and architects that help them create buildings with more attention to the occupants. In the past,…
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There's now just a month to go before many will be travelling to New Orleans for the first in-person Autodesk University since 2019. Aside from being back at event with 10,000 or so attendees – something many of us may well have forgotten how to do, including myself – this year's event will be different from those in recent years as it's being held somewhere other than Las Vegas. In Vegas it's possible to have that many people (give or take) hosted along with a full conference – including a significant exhibition space and somewhere to feed the hungry horde…