Conferences
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Yesterday I felt well enough to get myself out of bed before the sunrise to head across to Basel for this year's Swissbau, a biennial construction conference for the Swiss market. It was easier than in past years, as there's now a direct train from Neuchatel to Basel. (We used to have to change in Biel/Bienne). The journey was spectacular: as we skirted the Jura mountains, we went from dark and foggy to sunny and frosty (even snowy, in places). Arriving at the main station in Basel I had a few minutes to catch the tram out to the Messeplatz.…
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There's a public Call for Proposals now open - and will stay open for much of the month of December, closing on the 28th - for people to speak at DevCon 2026 in Amsterdam from April 15th-16th, 2026. I actually don't think I'll be submitting anything for this year's event - somewhat frustratingly I don't feel I've been working on anything that makes sense to present there - but I'm very much hoping to come along to attend sessions and meet with members of the developer community. If you're motivated to speak at DevCon, be sure to check out the…
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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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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…
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I was up early all three days I stayed in Nashville, irrespective of how late I ended up staying out the night before. I was pleased with myself for getting to the gym on Days 0, 1 and 2 of this year's AU. I was staying in the Omni Hotel, which happened to be the location of my Tuesday afternoon session. Which meant I could check out the room before I even made it across to the main conference venue. This year's venue - Music City Center - was really quite nice. The AU team did a solid job of…
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On Sunday I took the train across to Zurich to start the journey to Nashville for Autodesk University 2025. Everything went smoothly, to start with - I was through ZRH security in very little time, which is always nice. The person who checked my passport at the E gates (a special check specifically for people flying to the US) was an engineer who seemed very excited to speak to someone from Autodesk (despite being a SolidWorks user himself). Anyway, I eventually boarded the first leg to Chicago. My first movie choice for this trip was The Salt Road, which had…
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On Sunday I'll be heading to the US for a pretty full-on week, split between Autodesk University 2025 in Nashville, from Monday to Wednesday, and the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) 2025 conference in San Diego, from Thursday to Saturday. I asked AI to create an image morphing Nashville with San Diego and it came up with this. I know neither city well enough to recognize whether it succeeded, to be honest. There weren't any direct flights available between the various legs, so this is what I ended up with. It could always be worse, I suppose. On Monday…
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At the beginning of this week I recorded my class for Autodesk University 2025. It's largely a repeat from my session at DevCon 2025 in Amsterdam, so if you attended that class then this one won't be especially exciting (unless you're like me and a second watch of something is actually really helpful, these days!). Do you know my favourite thing so far about this year's conference? My "class ID" is 1980. For some reason this fills me with a great deal of satisfaction. Go figure. The in-person class will be held during the last session of Day 1 of…