Autodesk Research
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Last week I headed across to Barcelona for the annual offsite of our research team. As the dates of the meeting fell during my daughter's school holidays - a rare occurrence! - we were able to fly out together to Spain. Barcelona isn't Benidorm, but you do get the occasional hint of that very strange relationship that Spain has with the UK. We'd originally planned to fly to Barcelona on the Tuesday evening, but as Vueling decided to consolidate flights (at least I assume that's what happened - we were just notified that our flight time had changed to the…
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I mentioned some time ago that this announcement was coming: Autodesk Research has just posted our first two Visiting Scholar positions. People who have been around Autodesk Research for some time will remember us having had Visiting Fellows, in the past: the focus of that program was slightly different; tending towards industry rather than academia, even if at least one Fellow did join us from a university. So the fact this is a "new" program might feel like a nuance to some. Here's some context for the role: Visiting Scholar positions invite brilliant minds to work with us to collectively…
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On Friday I headed across to the Swiss Center for Design and Health in nearby Nidau (it's just a 30-minute drive from my home). I'd been invited by Michal Gath-Morad and Christoph Hölscher, who very kindly suggested I might find it interesting to join a meeting at the centre and tag along for a subsequent tour. I've been interested in visiting the SCDH for some time: in many ways it's similar to the UCL PEARL space, but it also has a very different focus and has made some really interesting choices because of it. A lot of things at the…
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I'm on the train back from Zurich airport after my whirlwind trip to Nashville and San Diego, so it's time for a wrap up post covering the rest of my time in the US. After a very interesting first day at ANFA 2025 in San Diego, we went back for more on the Friday and Saturday. During the opening it was great to see Autodesk Research being called out prominently as a sponsor. We're very happy to support a conference that's so well aligned with our research interests! The theme of Day 2 was "Designing for Human Flourishing" - with…
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In my last post I was heading from Nashville to San Diego for a conference organized by the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture - ANFA 2025. As mentioned at the end of the post, there was some uncertainty about whether I would be able to get to San Diego, given an incident at the airport that led to the main runway being shut, and lots of inbound flights being either diverted or cancelled. Mine ended up in the latter bucket, but only after I'd ordered my "dinner". I was told Delta would automatically rebook my flight for the following day…