Autodesk Research
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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…
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On Friday morning I was up before dawn to head across to Italy for the first of 12 lectures for a course I'm taking on Neuroscience and Design. The first of my trains arrived out of the fog to take me to the nearby town of Ins. The fast train from Neuchatel stops in Ins but not my local station, so from here you can get to Bern in about 20 minutes. I wasn't thrilled about waiting in Ins for 15 minutes at this time of day, but honestly it was quite magical. Dawn was breaking by the time I…
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While at the time of writing I'm not yet on the official speaker list, I'm happy to say that I will be presenting a session at the Autodesk DevCon that's being held in Amsterdam from May 20th-21st, 2025. I'll also be attending the Dynamo Hackathon on May 19th as a warm-up. My session is entitled "Supercharge your browser-based APS applications with WebAssembly" and will explore how you can take C++ libraries and build them into WebAssembly modules to bring impressive capabilities to your browser-based Autodesk Platform Services applications. Over the last few years I've spent quite a bit of time…
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On Friday I did my annual (well, it's actually only the second time, but I get the feeling it's becoming annual) trip to Winterthur for the Friday-night kick-off of this year's AEC Hackathon Zürich. The focus of the first set of Friday afternoon talks was on the wood industry and its challenges - a fascinating topic to hear about first-hand. I was actually more interested by the second set of talks, which were focused on digitalization challenges, including a really nice session by Michael Drobnik from Herzog & de Meuron. As last year there were lots of hackers present, and…
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I'm really excited to be starting a class later this month on Neuroscience and Design from POLI.design - the post-graduate school of design at the Politecnico di Milano. Most of the class is virtual - and in English, thankfully - but it's book-ended by in-person seminars, first in Milan and then in Venice for the opening of this year's biennale. I've never been to the biennale, so this is exciting in itself! Here's a description from the website: Nowadays, the design of artificial spaces and industrial artifacts requires the integration of technical expertise with knowledge from social sciences, physiology, psychology,…
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Since missing out on all the great snow over Christmas and New Year, I've been doing my best to catch up. This weekend left me feeling quite a bit better. The skies were clear, and while it hadn't snowed much before the weekend... ... it did snow overnight on Saturday. I was on the first lift up on Sunday and so got to make the most of the fresh snow accumulated on the pistes. Sheer joy.My flight on Sunday evening was at 6pm from Zurich, so I had to leave the slopes around noon to leave me enough time to…