Autodesk
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It's that time of year again: the Call for Proposals for AU 2023 is now open! This year's event is back in Las Vegas – it's being held at The Venetian from November 13th-15th. Interestingly this is a Monday to Wednesday slot, presumably to avoid overlap with the Las Vegas Formula 1 Grand Prix. I expect it's going to be very hard to find a hotel room in Las Vegas after AU is over, this year! I always find that the best way to be sure to get to AU is to get a class accepted, something that didn't happen…
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It's been really exciting – and sometimes even overwhelming – to see the fast-paced developments in the space of Generative AI over the last few months. It's clear that Large Language Models (LLMs) and other AI systems are increasingly playing a key role in our Future of Work. One thing that's often glossed over is the need for human input when building and refining these models: aside from being trained on vast datasets generated from websites and the broader internet, huge teams of people are helping train these AI models, providing "human processing within a computational framework", to quote a…
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On Sunday night I headed to Geneva airport to take a late flight to Copenhagen for a special Sustainability-focused APS Accelerator. I knew something was up with my flight when at 7:49pm the gate information that was promised to be shown at 7:25pm still wasn't posted. (This is Switzerland. Something was badly wrong with this scenario.) It turns out the inbound flight from Nice was delayed by an hour, which meant our flight to Copenhagen would arrive at midnight rather than 11pm. Walking through Copenhagen's beautiful airport at that time of night was highly surreal. It was completely deserted. After…
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Last week Rhys Goldstein and I had a blast joining Sol Amour and Jacob Small during the Dynamo Office Hours session on Packages of Note, something I mentioned in a recent post. We spent some time stepping through a few samples for both Space Analysis and VASA, to give a rough sense of what's involved in using each. Next week I'm heading over to Denmark for the first half of the week, where I'll be attending the APS Sustainability Accelerator in Copenhagen. If you're going to be in Copenhagen next week and want to meet up for a…
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Over on Instructables there's a student design challenge featuring the 5m Dar Smart Bridge. It's called "Make It Bridge", and the idea is that contestants – who have to be students aged between 13 and 21 and based in the USA or Canada (excluding Quebec, for some reason) – can place the geometry of the Dar bridge, or another bridge of their choosing, in surroundings to which it adds value. It sounds like a lot of fun. I like the guidance given: In choosing the site for the bridge, you might consider what it would look like from below and…
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Yesterday's Oscar ceremony was punctuated by a series of commercials (or adverts, as we call them back home) by Autodesk. The first few paid homage to a mythical filmmaker/visual effects specialist named Otto Desćinski – or Otto Desć to his friends. It was only during the third segment that the secret was unveiled, that the series was really all about Autodesk. Here's the extended cut, showing content from all three segments: The whole thing was really nicely executed: Ryan Reynolds' creative agency, Maximum Effort, were behind it, and our new Chief Marketing Officer, Dara Treseder, clearly played a role. I'm…
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I think I've mentioned in the past that in Switzerland the annual winter half-term break – the Winterferien or semaine blanche – is basically meant for skiing or snowboarding. Or sledging, I suppose. The canton of Neuchatel has its Republic Day on March 1st, so the holiday week always falls to include this day (other cantons have theirs sometime earlier in February). Frankly, with the shifting seasons, this is starting to feel a little late – snow is far from guaranteed, these days, at this time of year, and this winter season turned out to be exceptionally dry in the…
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Just as one APS Accelerator is wrapping up (this week's was held in-person in Pune, India and virtually around the world), it's time to think ahead to the next. And this next one is quite special. It's being held in the beautiful city of Copenhagen from March 20-24, 2023, and will have a particular focus on Sustainability. Our friends at Ramboll will be hosting the event at their gorgeous Head Office in the Ørestad neighbourhood of Copenhagen. A fantastic location for an Accelerator! Image courtesy of Ramboll If you have an idea for an impactful, sustainability-related project – perhaps focused…
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You don't have to look far, these days, to find dire prognostications about the death of the Metaverse. That's the nature of the hype cycle: those without the patience to help push technology through the Trough of Disillusionment move on to other things. Although the speed with which the Metaverse passed the Peak of Inflated Expectations in 2022 is impressive. Interestingly the Gartner Hype Cycle for 2016 reported Virtual Reality as having emerged onto the Slope of Enlightenment, but even at this time I felt this was premature. These models do have to be seen as what they are: approximations…
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Some huge news was dropped by the Autodesk Tandem team, last week. Their Facility Monitoring feature is now available to Tandem customers as a Beta release. This is effectively the culmination of more than a decade of our research into contextualising sensor (IoT) data inside 3D (mainly BIM) environments. It started through Project Dasher in late 2009, which – passing by our work on Dasher 360 from 2016 – led to the creation of the APS (formerly Forge) viewer's Data Visualization Extension in 2020-21. In this latest phase, Dasher has inspired the Tandem team to build out Dasher-like features to…