Autodesk Research
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I haven't posted since DevCon - other than the excellent guest posts being contributed by Patrick Nadeau - as we've entered quite a busy time of year. My team has now delivered a couple of shareouts for our company's senior leadership, and we'll shortly be going into the Research organisation's mid-year review cycle for our various projects. Anyway, this week has given me a bit of a breather: while Friday was a holiday in Switzerland, today is a holiday in the UK and Canada, presumably for Star Wars Day. May The Fourth Be With You Always! At the weekend I'll…
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Wednesday marked the start of this year's DevCon, after the warm-up day on Tuesday. Things started with a breakfast in the Expo Hall. (These pictures are actually from later in the day, when I happened to be upstairs by the balcony.) Autodeskers were asked to attend the keynotes in the overflow room. The main takeaways for me from the Day 1 keynote were around the imminent public availability of official MCP servers for some of our products, as well as the fact that Autodesk Assistant will be able to call MCP servers that partners have certified in our Design &…
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This week I've finally accepted the winter is over… here's a snap from yesterday, my last day on the slopes for this season. It's now time to think about spring, and where better to do that than Amsterdam? Alright, there's no need to mention say Paris or Osaka… spring is lovely in lots of places, but I happen to be going to Amsterdam. So there. Next week it's once again the Autodesk DevCon at the excellent and iconic Beurs Van Berlage conference venue, a short walk from Amsterdam Centraal station. In fact I'll be walking across from there on Tuesday…
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My team's research focus is on "simulating the human experience of design" (with respect to the designed space or object, rather than the process of designing). We call this "Enlivened Design", which is intended to indicate our interest in simulating and predicting how design can support human flourishing and well-being. The Enlivened Design team is delighted to welcome our first Visiting Scholar to Autodesk Research. Dr Fiona Zisch, with whom we've been collaborating for quite some time, between the 100 Minds in Motion project and our Encoding Experience events, has joined the Enlivened Design team for a period of several…
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Registration for DevCon 2026 is now officially open. The event will be held from April 15th-16th 2026 in the historic Beurs van Berlage conference centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. There's an additional pre-conference day on the 14th, so make sure to plan on attending that, too. Register today to save your spot and take advantage of early-bird pricing until February 20th! I said some time ago that I wasn't planning on presenting at this year's DevCon, but, well, I changed my mind and submitted a talk just before the deadline. I'm happy to say it was accepted. I'll be presenting…
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Yesterday I felt well enough to get myself out of bed before the sunrise to head across to Basel for this year's Swissbau, a biennial construction conference for the Swiss market. It was easier than in past years, as there's now a direct train from Neuchatel to Basel. (We used to have to change in Biel/Bienne). The journey was spectacular: as we skirted the Jura mountains, we went from dark and foggy to sunny and frosty (even snowy, in places). Arriving at the main station in Basel I had a few minutes to catch the tram out to the Messeplatz.…
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Last week I was back in the UK this week to visit friends and family but also for a networking event hosted by UCL's International Centre for NeuroArchitecture and NeuroDesign. I landed on Tuesday evening and went straight to Cookham to catch up with my brother and and old friend. It was a nice evening - and meal - but on the way home - quite early, at around 9:30pm - we came around a bend in the road (one with a 30mph speed limit) to find a car speeding towards us, trying to overtake another car. The car hit…
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My thanks to Frederik Brudy for letting me know about a recent publication from our research team. One of our summer internships from 2025 has resulted in a paper being published at EMNLP, the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. This was a new conference to me - as many of them are, admittedly - but it's a monster: it's 30 years old and this year's event had 3000+ accepted papers. The table of contents in the published findings runs to 90 pages. Gulp. Anyway, the paper our team helped author is called "IndoorWorld: Integrating Physical Task Solving…
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My last bit of travel for the year was to the UK, ostensibly to have internal discussions and a holiday meal, but it turned out to be a really good opportunity to build on our strong relationship with UCL. The weekend before - still in November! - I was able to kick off the snowboarding season with a sneaky trip up to the Alps. The slopes were really decent for this early in the season. I did get caught out at one point by the slopes having a different topology than usual: it's somewhere I go so regularly that I…
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The pre-recording of my DevCon 2025 class (which is basically identical to my AU 2025 class) is now live on YouTube along with other classes from the event. I hope you find the various recordings helpful, whether you were able to attend in person or not.