Autodesk Research
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
Autodesk Research is delighted to be sponsoring a PhD studentship at The Bartlett School of Architecture - part of University College London (UCL) - to research better, more equitable ways of modelling human navigation. Image courtesy of Hugo Spiers / UCL. The application deadline is short - it closes in just 2 weeks, on January 28th 2025 - so please do share this post with interested parties (or send them this LinkedIn posting). Information on applying can be found here. Here's a summary of the project from the main UELA (which stands for UCL EPSRC Landscape Award, recently renamed from…
-
Here we are again, at the end of another year. This time last year I posted a compilation of Autodesk's holiday greeting messages, and I thought I should do the same for 2024. This year's are very nice: I've been using the one with fairy lights for my Zoom backdrop for the last week or two, and it's been going down a (winter?) storm. Last year I reflected on my personal year ahead a little bit - and how our son would be studying in Baltimore for the academic year between 2024 and 2025. As it happens we're heading across…
-
The awesome team working on Autodesk Tandem has integrated a timeline - much as we had in Project Dasher, although the implementation is different - to bring Tandem into the fourth dimension. Here's a video describing Tandem's Time Navigation feature: This is really exciting news for people wanting to explore historical time-series data streamed in from their facilities. Tandem now has the full set of features that once-upon-a-time allowed Dasher to be used as a "building debugger". For more information on this exciting set of time-centric features, head on over to the forum post.
-
What seemed like a few short weeks after Autodesk University 2024 in San Diego, last week I was back in the San Francisco Bay Area for internal Autodesk Research meetings. On the Saturday I hopped on a flight from Zurich to San Francisco. The flight itself was comfortable enough - at least it was direct. I love arriving at SFO. It brings back all kinds of memories of when we lived in the Bay Area back in 2000-2003. The sun was setting as I took a Lyft into downtown SF. I stayed one night at Hotel G, which was on…
-
A year or so ago I posted about our collaboration with The Bentway, and how it kicked off some really interesting research into combining qualitative and quantitative data collected during efforts to measure the human experience of the built environment. Members of our team have been working hard with our talented research communications colleagues to create this interesting, in-depth article describing the collaboration. It complements the existing project page that has been up for a while now. Between these two pages we now have a couple of videos describing the project. The first shorter overview was from last year: …