Human-centric building design
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Wednesday marked the start of this year's DevCon, after the warm-up day on Tuesday. Things started with a breakfast in the Expo Hall. (These pictures are actually from later in the day, when I happened to be upstairs by the balcony.) Autodeskers were asked to attend the keynotes in the overflow room. The main takeaways for me from the Day 1 keynote were around the imminent public availability of official MCP servers for some of our products, as well as the fact that Autodesk Assistant will be able to call MCP servers that partners have certified in our Design &…
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My team's research focus is on "simulating the human experience of design" (with respect to the designed space or object, rather than the process of designing). We call this "Enlivened Design", which is intended to indicate our interest in simulating and predicting how design can support human flourishing and well-being. The Enlivened Design team is delighted to welcome our first Visiting Scholar to Autodesk Research. Dr Fiona Zisch, with whom we've been collaborating for quite some time, between the 100 Minds in Motion project and our Encoding Experience events, has joined the Enlivened Design team for a period of several…
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Registration for DevCon 2026 is now officially open. The event will be held from April 15th-16th 2026 in the historic Beurs van Berlage conference centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. There's an additional pre-conference day on the 14th, so make sure to plan on attending that, too. Register today to save your spot and take advantage of early-bird pricing until February 20th! I said some time ago that I wasn't planning on presenting at this year's DevCon, but, well, I changed my mind and submitted a talk just before the deadline. I'm happy to say it was accepted. I'll be presenting…
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Last week I was back in the UK this week to visit friends and family but also for a networking event hosted by UCL's International Centre for NeuroArchitecture and NeuroDesign. I landed on Tuesday evening and went straight to Cookham to catch up with my brother and and old friend. It was a nice evening - and meal - but on the way home - quite early, at around 9:30pm - we came around a bend in the road (one with a 30mph speed limit) to find a car speeding towards us, trying to overtake another car. The car hit…
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My thanks to Frederik Brudy for letting me know about a recent publication from our research team. One of our summer internships from 2025 has resulted in a paper being published at EMNLP, the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. This was a new conference to me - as many of them are, admittedly - but it's a monster: it's 30 years old and this year's event had 3000+ accepted papers. The table of contents in the published findings runs to 90 pages. Gulp. Anyway, the paper our team helped author is called "IndoorWorld: Integrating Physical Task Solving…
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My last bit of travel for the year was to the UK, ostensibly to have internal discussions and a holiday meal, but it turned out to be a really good opportunity to build on our strong relationship with UCL. The weekend before - still in November! - I was able to kick off the snowboarding season with a sneaky trip up to the Alps. The slopes were really decent for this early in the season. I did get caught out at one point by the slopes having a different topology than usual: it's somewhere I go so regularly that I…
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Back in April we started a series of events called "Encoding Experience", to which we invited thought leaders across academia and industry to discuss issues relating to capturing the human experience of the built environment. We started in Boston on April 25th, then went to San Francisco on April 29th - here's a post talking about the two events - and finished the 2025 series with one in London on September 2nd. Here are the Encoding Experience invitees/attendees for this year's event series (we've skipped the Autodesk Research staff so it fills a grid nicely ;-). We've also been publishing…
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At the beginning of the week I highlighted an interesting internship position inside Autodesk Research and promised to follow-up once our team's internships were all posted. Well, here we are. If you're interested in the human experience of design, you might well find one of the internship opportunities in our team to be worth applying for. PhD Intern, Research - Embodied AI Agents (Toronto, Canada) Intern, Research Working Student - Environmental Psychology Datasets (Bonn, Germany) PhD Intern, HCI & Visualization Research (Toronto, Canada) This last one is a catch-all for a number of our Research organization's HCI-related intern positions, but…
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Last week I headed across to Barcelona for the annual offsite of our research team. As the dates of the meeting fell during my daughter's school holidays - a rare occurrence! - we were able to fly out together to Spain. Barcelona isn't Benidorm, but you do get the occasional hint of that very strange relationship that Spain has with the UK. We'd originally planned to fly to Barcelona on the Tuesday evening, but as Vueling decided to consolidate flights (at least I assume that's what happened - we were just notified that our flight time had changed to the…
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I mentioned some time ago that this announcement was coming: Autodesk Research has just posted our first two Visiting Scholar positions. People who have been around Autodesk Research for some time will remember us having had Visiting Fellows, in the past: the focus of that program was slightly different; tending towards industry rather than academia, even if at least one Fellow did join us from a university. So the fact this is a "new" program might feel like a nuance to some. Here's some context for the role: Visiting Scholar positions invite brilliant minds to work with us to collectively…