Through the Interface

A paper on our space analysis algorithm in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

I’m very happy to share the news that a paper authored by current and former members of Autodesk Research has been published in the open access Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). The paper is entitled “Path Counting for Grid-Based Navigation” and talks in depth about the algorithm developed to power the Space Analysis package for Dynamo. Here’s the paper’s abstract, to tickle your fancy: Counting the number of shortest paths on a grid is a simple procedure with close ties to Pascal’s triangle. We show how path counting can be used to select relatively direct grid paths for... Read more →

Today’s presentations on AI for Urban Resilience

Today (June 22nd, 2022) at 11.00am and 4.00pm (CEST) you can join the final presentations for a very interesting MaCAD (Master in Advanced Computation for Architectural Design) program from IAAC (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia). You will be able to join the join the session via the IaaC MaCAD Facebook page. These presentations are the result of a studio on Artificial Intelligence in Architecture, with a particular focus on AI For Urban Resilience. During the studio, led by Angelos Chronis and assisted by Aleksandra Jastrzębska, Nariddh Khean, Serjoscha Düring, the students developed AI-driven urban solutions for the city... Read more →

My new role at Autodesk Research

For the last few weeks I’ve been heads-down on various activities I can’t blog about. It does worry me that this may well be the shape of things to come, but I’m also hopeful it’s just a short-term blip, and that I’ll find a way to get back on the blogging horse before too long. Basically, within the Autodesk Research organisation we’re some way through a significant shift in the way we perform research, focusing on larger, more audacious – and ultimately more impactful – research goals rather than having a more piecemeal research approach with lots of smaller... Read more →

Another look at bundle optimization for Dasher

Back in September I talked a bit about using a plugin for Rollup – the package bundler we use for Project Dasher – to start optimizing the bundling and delivery of JavaScript code. Over the last few days I’ve come back to this topic, as I felt it was time to dig into some issues. Dasher has three primary pages: The index page, where you arrive when you visit the site. The projects dashboard, which you can access if you have login credentials for the site. The Dasher viewer page itself, which most of you will have accessed via... Read more →

The Autodesk Tandem API is now in Beta

If you’ve visited the Tandem website, this week, you may have seen a little footer saying “Unleash the power of digital twins with Tandem APIs | Now in Beta”. This is interesting news for the many (100+, at the last count) developers using Forge to build digital twins. Those using Revit or IFC as a data-source will most probably find the possibility of building on Tandem to be of significant interest. If you click on the “Learn more about APIs” link to the right of the footer, you’ll end up on a page that describes the API and SDK... Read more →

The Forge Data Day in Munich

Today I’ve been in Munich for the inaugural event in the Forge Data Days tour. As I decided to attend at fairly short notice, I didn’t even look into flights: flying from Geneva or Zurich to Munich is expensive at the best of times (considering the distance), and with less than a week of advance notice it would have been ridiculous. So I took the bus, which cost about $20 each way. It’s an hour and half to get to Zurich from my place, and the direct bus to the centre of Munich took another four hours. Not bad,... Read more →

Come to the Forge Data Day in Munich on Tuesday!

I talked recently about the first in-person event tour that’s been held for Forge developers in at least a few years, this time focused on the new Forge Data offering (including the Data Exchange API that’s now in public beta). At the time I wasn’t sure which event I’d attend: there’s an in-person (finally!) Forge Accelerator next to the Barcelona event, which made that one especially interesting, for instance. In the end the timing for the Munich event worked best. I’ve now booked my hotel and bus ticket, and I’ll be there for the first event in the global... Read more →

A new book on Innovation in Construction

The Autodesk Construction Cloud team kindly shared a post on LinkedIn, last week, about a project I participated in. There’s a new book from Springer on “Innovation in Construction” for which I contributed a chapter called “Cutting-Edge Practical Research on Generative Design, IoT and Digital Twins”. This chapter weighs in at 29 pages – of an overall 454 for the book – and here’s its abstract: This chapter explores two areas of research undertaken by Autodesk over the last decade and how they both have the potential to impact the construction industry. The first area relates to the Internet... Read more →

Our 20th anniversary balloon trip

My wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary back in November. We celebrated as a family with our three great kids making vegan sushi for us all. At the time my wife said that there was a present on its way, but that it may take a while. I didn’t think much of it, until this weekend. On Saturday I was told “you need to get an early night, as tomorrow we’re leaving for our anniversary surprise at 5am.” At the time it didn’t seem like much of a gift – getting out of bed at 5am isn’t... Read more →

The Autodesk Gallery opening and the 2m Dar Smart Bridge at DCW 2022

A few events have happened over the last few weeks that I would have loved to have attended, had I had the energy (and been in better shape). The first was the grand opening of the Autodesk Gallery on May 11th. I received an invite – because of my participation in the NEST project – but as I was planning on actually being at the NEST building that day I declined. And I ended up being home with Covid, so there’s that. The gallery was opened by SF Mayor London Breed. Here’s a snap of Andrew Anagnost showing the... Read more →

Smarter Bridges Conference 2022

On Sunday I flew back across from Zurich to Schipol for a small, 2-day conference attended by various stakeholders in the MX3D smartbridge project. Very confusingly there were two flights leaving for Amsterdam at exactly the same time – 17h35 – so I very nearly ended up at the wrong gate. Luckily I realised in time. On arriving at Schipol I took the train to Amsterdam Centraal, where I saw an overnight train back to Switzerland was about to leave. (I had tried hard to find a space on this train to come across for the conference, but it... Read more →

The NEST building’s HiLo roof

This week I was supposed to be back in Zurich for a couple of days, visiting the NEST building on Tuesday and the ETH campus on Wednesday. As it was, though, I managed to pick up Covid at last week’s TechX event in Atlanta, so I ended up staying at home feeling sorry for myself. I haven’t had particularly bad symptoms, thankfully: neither headaches nor fever, just mainly a heavy cough and a bit of brain fog, both of which are thankfully clearing up now. Given the value of last week’s event I’d certainly say that getting it relatively... Read more →

TechX 2022 in Atlanta

On Monday I flew from Geneva to Paris and then changed flights to head across to Atlanta for TechX 2022. TechX is Autodesk’s annual internal technology geekfest. This year’s TechX – the first in-person event since 2019’s in New Orleans – has been held in the Atlanta Hilton. I have a room that’s on a high floor, and as I’m waking up with jetlag for the first time in nearly 3 years, I managed to see the view across the city as the sun came up. The mornings have kicked off with keynote sessions. Andrew Anagnost, our CEO, showed... Read more →

Working around the Chrome bug affecting the timeline

The amazing Mike Lee – who has been doing a great job of driving the timeline project for Dasher – has used his sleuthing skills to figure out a way around the bug affecting Intel-based Macs running Chrome v100 on Monterey. He was about to submit a bug when he discovered this ticket filed against Chromium, and a workaround buried within in. (Mike has since gone ahead and submitted his own report tracking this.) You need to go to chrome://flags and disable “Use passthrough command decoder”. After restarting Chrome and launching Dasher, you should now see the timeline is... Read more →

More on Tandem and Dasher

This week we’ve updated the Project Dasher site with a new build – the first update we’ve made in nearly a year. (I’ve talked about some of the rewrite work in a previous post, but it’s taken a while to get around to making it all available.) One of the major improvements has been with the timeline component. At some point in the future I’ll spend some time talking more about the timeline’s features – it’s available publicly via NPM and is integrated into the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization extension reference application – but for now I just wanted... Read more →

Happy 40th birthday, Speccy!

On Saturday the ZX Spectrum turned 40. Does that make anyone else feel old? When first released on April 23rd, 1982, Sinclair Research’s ZX Spectrum had 16K of RAM, a horrible rubber keyboard and some very quirky colour graphics. In fairness, though, it was a quantum leap (another Sinclair reference for the astute observer) beyond the ZX81, which had – unexpanded – just 1K of RAM, a truly grotesque membrane keyboard and low-res black and white graphics. Both of these devices changed the world: the Spectrum went on to become the UK’s best-selling microcomputer, launching an industry and many,... Read more →

Harnessing the Tandem SDK inside Dasher

Back in September we started the work to integrate the (currently still internal) SDK for Autodesk Tandem into Project Dasher. This is what I’ve referred to, in the past, as “Tandem inside Dasher” (as opposed to “Dasher inside Tandem”). The work hasn’t been happening constantly: it’s been intermittent, as changes were needed to both Tandem and the core Forge viewer to support certain workflows. I’m happy to say that, as of this week, the integration is pretty close to having parity with the version based on the traditional Forge viewer, with a few gaps that should be filled in... Read more →

Back from the long Easter weekend

In Europe many of us have been enjoying a four-day weekend for Easter. As my birthday this year fell on Maundy Thursday, I decided to extend it to five (fantastic) days. We’d previously planned to meet up with some old friends from Singapore who are visiting Italy, but we a) wanted to stay around to support our eldest son who’s busy revising for his baccalauréat exams and b) didn’t want to have to worry about Covid-related restrictions that are still in place in Italy. So we ended up staying in Switzerland. During the day of my birthday itself, we... Read more →

Three AU proposals to vote for and a deadline reminder

It’s the last few days to submit your class proposals for Autodesk University 2022 in New Orleans. The Call for Proposals closes on April 15th. I’ve now submitted three classes, myself, and would greatly appreciate you voting for the one(s) you would like to see part of the event. This is whether you intend on being there in-person in New Orleans or not: the vast majority of classes will either be livestreamed or recorded and made available on-demand for virtual attendees. Here they are. Voting is open until April 25th. Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis inside Dynamo Building Digital Twins... Read more →

Forge Data Days coming to a city near you

Now that I’ve recovered from this week’s trip to Paris – and from both the pleasure and the shock of seeing people physically in meatspace – it’s time to look ahead to another trip. The Developer Advocacy and Support team have announced a new worldwide event tour where they’ll be talking to people about the upcoming Forge Data platform. Here are the dates that were confirmed at the time of writing this post: Europe May 31st | Munich, Germany June 2nd | Gothenburg, Sweden June 7th | Birmingham, UK June 9th | Milan, Italy June 14th | Barcelona, Spain... Read more →