Through the Interface

Arrived in Toronto

My first trip of 2023 has taken me back to Canada, to the fine city of Toronto. We have a team meeting there for our area of research which I’m really looking forward to: we’ve had several months of preparatory work – performed asynchronously – so it’s almost certainly overdue that we all get together. In any case it’s a timely way to kick off the year. I cut short a ski weekend (one of many, living in Switzerland – no-one should feel bad for me) to hop on a bus and take a few connecting trains to get... Read more →

Reflections on what’s coming in 2023

Today is my first day back after a much-needed 3-week break. For most of that period we were up in the mountains, and split our time between snowboarding and snowshoeing with the puppy. We had some unseasonably mild weather in the Alps, over the break, but we did still manage to make the most of what snow there was. During the course of the break, I spent some time thinking back on 2022 and looking ahead to 2023. For me, 2022 has brought a significant amount of change and uncertainty, between changes in role, escalating climate issues or the... Read more →

Winding down for the festive season

Autodesk offices in most places around the globe have been closed this week as part of an extended holiday break. From my side I’ve managed to spend a couple of days on the slopes, here in Switzerland, although I ended up coming back down to the lakeside as there’s a strange weather blip where it’s currently warm and wet enough to be raining in the Alps for the lead-up to Christmas. Ah well. I’ve been having fun working through Advent of Code, although – as ever for this time in December – the coding challenges are starting to get... Read more →

Opportunities in the Tandem team

If you’re looking to join Autodesk to work on our platform for building digital twins, then the Tandem team has a number of openings that may be of interest to you. Product Managers – or wannabe PMs – should check out this North America-based posting. For people more interested in Customer Success positions, there’s a Europe-based CSM role posted. One more role that’s of particular interest to me, at least, is for a Boston-based Developer Advocate. In terms of progress with the Tandem product, I recommend checking out this recent article in AEC Magazine by Martyn Day. Although I... Read more →

In Dublin for the APS Accelerator

On Wednesday I came across to Dublin for the latter part of the APS Accelerator being held, here. Jaime Rosales – who has been here with Sergio Leone and Adam Nagy from the APS Developer Advocacy and Support team – has taken some lovely pictures during this trip. The better ones in this post were taken by him. I unfortunately just missed Peter Schlipf – who was here for the first half of the week – which was a great shame. Here are some pictures of the city. We were mostly staying in the Hilton Garden Inn, so to... Read more →

Kicking off the holiday season

Last week – coincidentally on Thanksgiving in the US – Autodesk Switzerland held its first Christmas event since the beginning of the pandemic. The team based in our Gümligen office (which is on the southern outskirts of Bern) joined those of us working from home from various locations throughout the country at a nice restaurant in Bern’s city centre for a delicious meal. It was lovely to catch up with old friends and even meet a few new ones. This week has been busy with (largely administrative) year-end tasks, but I have found a few minutes at the beginning... Read more →

Explaining how path counting helps simulate natural navigation

Rhys Goldstein, an Autodesk Research colleague with whom I’ve had the great pleasure of collaborating on various projects, over the years, has written an excellent explainer article that has just been published in Towards Data Science. This is intended as a companion to our paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, something I talked about in this recent post. Firstly, though, a quick shout-out to Zach Kron, who kindly allowed an image of one of his watercolours to be used in the article; one he created with the help of Dynamo and the Space Analysis package, which... Read more →

AI projects at Autodesk Research

There’s a lot going on with AI at Autodesk, these days: most of our engineering teams have developers who are exploring the potential for AI with respect to product features. For instance, the AutoCAD team has developed and released a number of features driven by machine learning: AutoCAD 2023’s Markup Assist and My Insights features – the latter with its cool Macro Advisor capability – are all powered by ML. I’m less familiar with ML-powered features in Revit and Fusion 360, but I know they have teams focusing on exploring the benefits ML might bring to their users. All... Read more →

Join us at the last European APS Accelerator of the year in Dublin

The Autodesk Platform Services – formerly known as Forge – team is holding one last Accelerator in Europe before the holiday break. It’s going to be from December 5-9 in Dublin, Ireland. You can register until November 28. As always these events are a fantastic way to kickstart any new project using APS (Forge) or to accelerate feature development of an existing one. It’s basically 5 free days of consulting from Autodesk – all you have to pay for are travel and accommodation. I was already planning a last trip (of the year) to the UK for the following... Read more →

Building the 5m Dar Smart Bridge

Now that my head is briefly back above water following Autodesk University 2022 and some time off with the family, I thought I’d revisit the Dar 5m Smart Bridge project to share some of the things I learned about it during AU in New Orleans. As a reminder, I was not heavily involved in the building of the bridge itself – although I did track it with great interest from a distance – as my role really only came into play in the final stages of the project, when we were looking to get the data from the bridge... Read more →

Your input on the future of AEC professions

[Firstly, apologies to regular readers who have struggled to load this blog over the last week or so. Typepad has had the mother of all outages, but things seem to be back on track now.] One of my oldest friends, Matt Armitage, lives in Kuala Lumpur and participates in a regular show on a local business-oriented radio station – BFM 89.9 – talking about technology. The show is called Mattsplained (abbreviated to MSP) and I have to admit I’m completely hooked on it (I happen to listen to it via Spotify, but I think it’s on all major podcast... Read more →

Join the beta for the AEC Cloud Information Model API

Autodesk Platform Services – the platform formerly known as Forge – has a brand new service that’s soon going into beta: the AEC Cloud Information Model API. This API will allow you to access design parameters in Revit models hosted in the cloud with no need to pass by an instance Revit. The managed beta will give you access to data extracted from a fixed set of Revit sample models that is then hosted in the Autodesk Construction Cloud. It’ll be a great way to understand how the API works and provide feedback to the engineering team to steer... Read more →

AI+X Summit 2022

On Friday I hopped on a train to Zurich to attend the AI+X Summit 2022 event – organised by the ETH AI Center – which was co-located with the ETH Entrepreneur Club’s Launch event. It was a lovely autumn day, and the colours were even on display in Zurich’s Oerlikon district. The event was held at Stage One, an event space a short walk from the Oerlikon train station. I was mainly there for the AI+AEC workshop, but there were a number of mainstage presentations and exhibits by startups and larger companies involved in AI. The workshops were held... Read more →

Ballenberg, Ticino and the Bernese Oberland

Our children’s school holidays came right after this year’s Autodesk University in New Orleans, so I was highly relieved (and not a little stunned) that I came back from such a large event without Covid. (I managed to get it at the last large gathering I attended, so it’s just possible that my resistance is still in place. Either way, it was a relief!) We had some things to take care of on the Monday of last week, but on Tuesday we hit the road for Ballenberg, the Swiss Open-Air Museum. It’s basically a historical celebration of Swiss culture... Read more →

Another Autodesk University is over

That’s it for another whirlwind AU! This year’s AU was a very different one for me. Normally I’m delivering a class or two and end up spending several hours in meetings with customers – I almost never get to spend time in the Expo. In contrast I spent almost all of my time at this year’s event in the Expo standing on or talking about a bridge, so I can’t give any meaningful commentary about the broader event, sadly. One thing I will say – beyond whatever takeaways people have related to the change of venue (New Orleans over... Read more →

Come and see the 5m Dar Smart Bridge at Autodesk University 2022

In a recent post I hinted at a really impressive project that is being unveiled today in the exhibit hall of AU 2022. (My involvement was as usual pretty minor, primarily relating to data visualization, while the really impressive work was around designing and printing it.) The project is a 5 metre long single-cantilevered (in terms of the printing – it’s supported at both ends when in use) smart bridge, 3D-printed from recycled PETG and glass fibre in our Boston Technology Center for Dar. Here’s a video shared via LinkedIn that describes the project and a photo of Steve... Read more →

Human-centric building design

In a recent post, I mentioned that I’ve been asked to help lead our efforts in a particular area of research. I was deliberately vague at the time. Now, with Autodesk University 2022 around the corner, it seems a good time to say more about this. I hope it stimulates some interesting discussions at the event. As a company, one of Autodesk’s core interests is to enable the design and creation of healthier, safer, more resilient spaces. We want to explore tools for designers and architects that help them create buildings with more attention to the occupants. In the... Read more →

Exciting updates on Tandem & seeing them at AU

If you didn’t get the chance to watch last week’s webinar by the Autodesk Tandem team – their September 2022 webinar – then I highly recommend checking out the recording, especially if you’re interested in updates to their work on displaying sensor data. If you liked Project Dasher, you’re going to love the work that’s being done in Tandem. :-) Questions were asked during the webinar about attendees’ interests regarding workflows for heatmaps: If you missed the chance to vote – but have strong opinions on these workflows and would like to provide detailed feedback – then you can... Read more →

A new site dedicated to technology and engineering at Autodesk

There’s a new Autodesk site that many of you will find interesting: tech.autodesk.com has just launched, a showcase for technology and engineering at Autodesk. The site will be a great resource for people interested in learning about the technical work performed by our employees and will also be a way for Autodesk engineering talent to connect with the outside world. I’m really looking forward to seeing what our development teams share through this new mechanism. The site has linked to blogs written by a few of the company’s technologists, including this one. That was very nice to see, I... Read more →

Next week is the Forge Hackathon

Back at the beginning of August I mentioned the upcoming Forge Hackathon which precedes Autodesk University 2022. Well, the upcoming has become the immediate, and next week it’s happening! So if you’ve been debating whether or not to join the event, it’s time to make a decision and (hopefully) register. It’s a great opportunity to showcase your development team’s capabilities, to create something genuinely novel using Forge, or simple to kick back and have some fun. Or ideally all of the above. :-) (See this blog post for a reminder of the prize categories and judging criteria.) Read more →