Autodesk Research
-
I'm in London for a few days this week for some internal meetings and a customer visit. While visiting the Soho office I checked in with my Autodesk Research colleague Allin Groom about a project he and Matt Oosthuizen have undertaken to help reduce the impact of waste in the office. The inspiration for the project was an all too common problem: a lot of waste generated by employees – many of whom buy takeaway lunches at local shops and restaurants – comes in the form of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers. While this material is nominally recyclable, Allin and Matt…
-
I'm very happy to share the news that a paper authored by current and former members of Autodesk Research has been published in the open access Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). The paper is entitled "Path Counting for Grid-Based Navigation" and talks in depth about the algorithm developed to power the Space Analysis package for Dynamo. Here's the paper's abstract, to tickle your fancy: Counting the number of shortest paths on a grid is a simple procedure with close ties to Pascal's triangle. We show how path counting can be used to select relatively direct grid paths for AI-related…
-
For the last few weeks I've been heads-down on various activities I can't blog about. It does worry me that this may well be the shape of things to come, but I'm also hopeful it's just a short-term blip, and that I'll find a way to get back on the blogging horse before too long. Basically, within the Autodesk Research organisation we're some way through a significant shift in the way we perform research, focusing on larger, more audacious – and ultimately more impactful – research goals rather than having a more piecemeal research approach with lots of smaller projects.…
-
Back in September I talked a bit about using a plugin for Rollup – the package bundler we use for Project Dasher – to start optimizing the bundling and delivery of JavaScript code. Over the last few days I've come back to this topic, as I felt it was time to dig into some issues. Dasher has three primary pages: The index page, where you arrive when you visit the site. The projects dashboard, which you can access if you have login credentials for the site. The Dasher viewer page itself, which most of you will have accessed via the…
-
The Autodesk Construction Cloud team kindly shared a post on LinkedIn, last week, about a project I participated in. There's a new book from Springer on "Innovation in Construction" for which I contributed a chapter called "Cutting-Edge Practical Research on Generative Design, IoT and Digital Twins". This chapter weighs in at 29 pages – of an overall 454 for the book – and here's its abstract: This chapter explores two areas of research undertaken by Autodesk over the last decade and how they both have the potential to impact the construction industry. The first area relates to the Internet of…
-
A few events have happened over the last few weeks that I would have loved to have attended, had I had the energy (and been in better shape). The first was the grand opening of the Autodesk Gallery on May 11th. I received an invite – because of my participation in the NEST project – but as I was planning on actually being at the NEST building that day I declined. And I ended up being home with Covid, so there's that. The gallery was opened by SF Mayor London Breed. Here's a snap of Andrew Anagnost showing the NEST…
-
On Sunday I flew back across from Zurich to Schipol for a small, 2-day conference attended by various stakeholders in the MX3D smartbridge project. Very confusingly there were two flights leaving for Amsterdam at exactly the same time – 17h35 – so I very nearly ended up at the wrong gate. Luckily I realised in time. On arriving at Schipol I took the train to Amsterdam Centraal, where I saw an overnight train back to Switzerland was about to leave. (I had tried hard to find a space on this train to come across for the conference, but it seems…
-
On Monday I flew from Geneva to Paris and then changed flights to head across to Atlanta for TechX 2022. TechX is Autodesk's annual internal technology geekfest. This year's TechX – the first in-person event since 2019's in New Orleans – has been held in the Atlanta Hilton. I have a room that's on a high floor, and as I'm waking up with jetlag for the first time in nearly 3 years, I managed to see the view across the city as the sun came up. The mornings have kicked off with keynote sessions. Andrew Anagnost, our CEO, showed a…
-
The amazing Mike Lee – who has been doing a great job of driving the timeline project for Dasher – has used his sleuthing skills to figure out a way around the bug affecting Intel-based Macs running Chrome v100 on Monterey. He was about to submit a bug when he discovered this ticket filed against Chromium, and a workaround buried within in. (Mike has since gone ahead and submitted his own report tracking this.) You need to go to chrome://flags and disable "Use passthrough command decoder". After restarting Chrome and launching Dasher, you should now see the timeline is back.…
-
This week we've updated the Project Dasher site with a new build – the first update we've made in nearly a year. (I've talked about some of the rewrite work in a previous post, but it's taken a while to get around to making it all available.) One of the major improvements has been with the timeline component. At some point in the future I'll spend some time talking more about the timeline's features – it's available publicly via NPM and is integrated into the Forge viewer's Data Visualization extension reference application – but for now I just wanted to…