Autodesk Research
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.
-
The last post talked about the trip across to Santa Fe and the first few days settling in. Now that I'm back from the week away, I've written up the second part of the mini-series, which covers the main part of the trip and the return. As I was up early with jet lag on my second morning in Santa Fe, I headed across the car park to "the gym" at the resort. I use inverted commas because it really wasn't much of a gym, and by the time I arrived it was already full of Autodeskers (three of my…
-
On Saturday I went to the station in foggy Neuchatel to take the train to Zurich. From there I was heading to the town of Santa Fe in New Mexico - somewhere I'd never been - for our annual meeting of the leaders working on our various research areas. There are no direct flights to Santa Fe - it's a very small domestic-only airport in the US - and the best I could do was fly to San Francisco and take a smaller plane to Albuquerque. Which is only an hour's drive from Santa Fe. I was really apprehensive about…
-
Back in April we started a series of events called "Encoding Experience", to which we invited thought leaders across academia and industry to discuss issues relating to capturing the human experience of the built environment. We started in Boston on April 25th, then went to San Francisco on April 29th - here's a post talking about the two events - and finished the 2025 series with one in London on September 2nd. Here are the Encoding Experience invitees/attendees for this year's event series (we've skipped the Autodesk Research staff so it fills a grid nicely ;-). We've also been publishing…
-
At the beginning of the week I highlighted an interesting internship position inside Autodesk Research and promised to follow-up once our team's internships were all posted. Well, here we are. If you're interested in the human experience of design, you might well find one of the internship opportunities in our team to be worth applying for. PhD Intern, Research - Embodied AI Agents (Toronto, Canada) Intern, Research Working Student - Environmental Psychology Datasets (Bonn, Germany) PhD Intern, HCI & Visualization Research (Toronto, Canada) This last one is a catch-all for a number of our Research organization's HCI-related intern positions, but…
-
My team has three internships that are about to be posted. As soon as they're up I'll be announcing them here, of course, but in the meantime here's a really cool one that's already open on a parallel team. Intern, AI Agent and Knowledge Graphs This position is about exploring how agentic workflows might change the future of design (in this case it's more about workflow-level agents rather than the kind of embodied agents that my team is more interested in). If you're into all things agent-related - including technologies such as knowledge graphs and Model Context Protocol - then…