Through the Interface

Managing meshes with the Forma API

Last week I spent quite a bit of time on the slopes snowboarding, but mostly in the mornings: I was back working at my computer in the afternoons. And while the mornings weren’t meant to be spent working, I actually found that some of my best ideas came to me while sitting on a chair-lift. One such idea was around efficient mesh management inside Forma. We’ve been working on a prototype web-based multi-agent simulation system where the results are displayed in either Forma or Tandem. This will form much of what I'll talk about in my session at the... Read more →

A day in Milan for the Neuroscience and Design course kick-off

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... Read more →

Learn about combining APS and WebAssembly at Autodesk DevCon Europe

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... Read more →

Hackathons in Zurich and (soon) Amsterdam

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,... Read more →

A course on Neuroscience and Design at POLI.design

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,... Read more →

ResearchX in the UK (and beyond!)

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... Read more →

Register today for the Autodesk DevCon 2025 in Amsterdam!

Well this is exciting: it’s now possible to register for this year’s Autodesk DevCon. It’s being held in Amsterdam from May 20th-21st and is the only Autodesk DevCon event being organized in 2025. (There will be APS-related content at Autodesk University 2025 in Nashville, of course.) I mentioned the DevCon - and the personal significance of it being held in Amsterdam - back during the CFP process. The venue is the historic Beurs van Berlage which dates from the end of the 19th century. Amsterdam is actually the cradle of modern securities trading, with the Dutch East India Company... Read more →

Work on a PhD project with Autodesk Research and The Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL

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... Read more →

The Walmsleys hit the US: Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia

In the last post I shared some experiences from the first half of our two-week trip to the United States. Now we’ll look at the second half. After leaving Bethany Beach we headed northwards along the coast, stopping at a few outlets along the way. Shopping in Delaware is presumably a thing because of the lack of sales tax. I will say that from this trip - and my son’s stay in US generally - it’s obvious that prices have gone up a huge amount over the last few years. Switzerland used to feel really expensive when compared with... Read more →

The Walmsleys hit the US: Washington DC and Delaware

We're back from a wonderful two week break in the United States. In this post and the next I'll share some pictures and talk a little about the experiences we had. Since much earlier in the year we’d planned on spending the holidays in the US with our son who's studying for an exchange year in Baltimore. This was well before it became clear that the Alps would be getting the most snow over the holiday period than we've seen in the last decade or so. A bit of a shame - we typically enjoy the Swiss slopes at... Read more →

Season's greetings

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... Read more →

Tandem gets a timeline!

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. Read more →

Back in the Bay Area

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... Read more →

Measuring the feeling of architecture: an article about our collaboration with The Bentway

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:... Read more →

Submit your Autodesk DevCon Europe 2025 class proposals

As I mentioned after the announcement at AU 2024, I was thrilled to see an Autodesk DevCon happening back in the fine city of Amsterdam. It’ll be held from May 20-21, 2025. The last one I attended was the week (maybe a few days more) after I joined Autodesk, back in August of 1995. I wasn’t actually presenting at that first one, if memory serves me right, I was assisting my colleague Jim Tinney with his presentation about the Autodesk WorkCenter API. The event was held in a super-fancy Japanese hotel in Amsterdam - at least it certainly seemed... Read more →

Dogs of Autodesk

Autodesk loves its dogs. You might say it’s in the company’s DNA. One of my favourite internal Slack channels is #fun-dogs-of-autodesk (the “fun” prefix just indicates it’s not business-related). Susan Taylor posted a link to a CBS flashback video there yesterday, which speaks to our long history of welcoming furry friends into the workplace. There are lots of familiar faces in this video: Lynn Levy, Linda Saldana and Patti Harris (who very sadly passed away some years ago). I worked with them all in the 90s/00s in some capacity, so this was a real “blast from the past”. By... Read more →

AU 2024 Days 2 and 3

After a great first day of Autodesk University - and it's preceding Dynamo Day - it was time for Days 2 and 3. After breakfast and an internal meeting, I headed to the Expo to watch the Day 2 General Session. It wasn’t quite as impressive as seeing it in the mainstage venue itself, but it was convenient being able to sit at a table and write up the last blog post. There’s something about the view from the escalators that made me want to continually snap this photo! I headed up the escalators to attend Ray Wang's Theater... Read more →

AU 2024 Days 0 and 1

On Sunday morning I headed across to Geneva Airport for my trip to Autodesk University 2024 in San Diego.The trip itself didn’t start very smoothly: I couldn't check in online - I suspect having two passports, only one of which has a valid US ESTA - meant that the airline flagged me for manual review. I really need to be more careful with my API (not the one I work with usually ;-) in future. Anyway, this check-in fail led to a cascade of irritations, from having to pay for a seat (to avoid being assigned a middle seat... Read more →

250 years of programmable computing

This is a topic I can’t quite believe I haven’t covered at any point during this blog’s existence, as I'm such a huge fan of a) the Neuchâtel region and b) vintage computing. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the creation of the world’s first programmable computer, which also happened to be the world’s first programmable robot. This might be a bit confusing to some, especially those who associate this concept with Babbage, Turing, etc. The world’s first “computer” was a mechanical automaton that translated a “program” into (mechanical) hand-written output. So no, it’s not a general-purpose computing... Read more →

Gearing up for AU 2024

We’re once again in the craziness before the storm (hmm - wasn’t there meant to be some calm?!?) that is Autodesk University. Requests for meetings are gradually filling up calendars… from my side it’s looking like another busy (but very fun) event. As a reminder, here are the classes that I’ll be part of, in some capacity this year. The class on extending Forma - where I’m co-speaking - has the slides and handout posted, in case you want to check it out ahead of time. In anticipation of this year's event (and the chance to connect with academic... Read more →