Autodesk Research
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After posting several times about our recent trip to the US - with stops in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco - it's time to talk about the broader purpose of the tour. My team has been organizing a series of evening events called "Encoding Experience", with the primary goal of bringing together a community of interest around capturing the human experience of the built environment. We invited interesting people from academia and industry to come together and have a discussion about how we might start to quantify and simulate human experience. Our first event was in Boston on April…
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After posting about our time in Boston and Los Angeles, it's now time to talk about San Francisco. Before finally (in the next post) getting around to the whole point of the trip. Let's hope it's not too much of an anti-climax. On Monday of last week, Dagmara and I arrived in San Francisco after a short hop from LA. Seeing the Marin Airporter brought back lots of memories from when I lived in San Rafael from 2000 to 2003, back before Uber and Lyft made airport drop-offs a breeze. I can't count the number of times I took the…
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In the last post I talked about arriving in Boston. I've deliberately skipped the reason we were in Boston - and in San Francisco afterwards, too - as I'll cover those in an upcoming post. I do want to spend some time talking about what we did between Boston and SF, though. When I originally looked at the options for this trip, I first thought about spending the weekend in Baltimore with my son: it turns out he's in full-on exam period, though, so it wouldn't have been the best time to visit, to say the least. Besides that he'll…
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After a relaxing long Easter weekend, on Wednesday I was back on the train to Zurich airport. This trip is primarily for events we're holding in Boston and San Francisco, but we decided to insert a stop in Los Angeles between the two, to catch up with a number of people there and and to visit venues for the LA28 Olympic Games. But first, I had to get to the E gates at Zurich airport. Not that this was particularly arduous, I just happened to snap a photo on the train that goes there. I've recently been granted frequent flyer…
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In Europe we're about to celebrate the long Easter weekend, so things have been a little busy finishing up work in a number of areas, especially as soon after I'll be heading across to the US for the rest of the month. I managed to submit two Autodesk University 2025 proposals - let's hope that at least one of them gets accepted. I was also (apparently) the first DevCon presenter to record their session ahead of next month's event. I'm very happy to have gotten that one out of the way before my travels. I haven't had time to properly…
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After a relatively quiet winter season - I've had a few trips to the UK and Italy, but nothing too hectic - things are about to get much more busy. Looking at my calendar I see trips to Italy and the UK again, but also trips to Boston, L.A. and SF (thankfully all in one trip) and others to Amsterdam and Toronto. And it's only going to get busier. I'm actually really lucky to have been able to attend the Neuroscience and Design class during this period: only one of the 12 sessions looks like it's going to be affected…
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I'm roughly halfway through a class on Neuroscience and Design, which has introduced me to many interesting new concepts and many interesting new people, too. It's through this class that I've connected with the Future Cities Lab - which has staff both at ETH Zurich and its satellite location in Singapore - who are performing some really valuable research. They're currently running a survey to understand how cognitive sciences impact architectural design. Here's a description of what they're looking for in their own words: This research aims to explore how well knowledge from cognitive sciences is being integrated into architectural…
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People are talking a lot about vibe coding, these days. What will this mean for people working as software engineers? My own personal sense is that productivity will be greatly improved with LLM tools - something we're starting to see happen - but it's premature to say large numbers of jobs will disappear. We'll see how things play out. An important factor around this trend is "getting the right vibe". How can we be expected to vibe code when the vibe is off? We've been thinking about this a lot at Autodesk Research, where we're looking at developing tools to…
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The countdown is officially on for AU 2025, which is being held in Nashville, Tennessee, from September 16-18. Things kicked off properly on Thursday with the CFP opening. It'll be possible to submit your class proposal from now until April 17. The big news for this year's event is that there will be a new class length available to folks: in addition to a 50+10 (talk+Q&A, in minutes) session there will be the option of 20+10, also. It will also only be possible to submit a maximum of 3 proposals per person. This might not sound like a big change,…
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Last week I spent quite a bit of time on the slopes snowboarding, but mostly in the mornings: I was back working at my computer in the afternoons. And while the mornings weren't meant to be spent working, I actually found that some of my best ideas came to me while sitting on a chair-lift. One such idea was around efficient mesh management inside Forma. We've been working on a prototype web-based multi-agent simulation system where the results are displayed in either Forma or Tandem. This will form much of what I'll talk about in my session at the upcoming…