Last week prospective speakers who submitted class proposals for AU 2025 - which is being held in Nashville from September 16-18 - were notified whether the sessions were accepted or not.
For this year's AU I'd submitted two classes. One was a look at various technologies we've been exploring to capture the human experience of the built environment, going back to projects such as the one we did with The Bentway, but also looking at more recent efforts involving crowdsourcing, EEG and VR. Unfortunately this class was declined.
My other proposal was to repeat the session I delivered at the Autodesk DevCon in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, talking about harnessing WebAssembly from Forma extensions and other APS applications. I'd actually been in two minds whether to submit this one, so I checked in with the Developer Advocacy & Support team. They suggested it was worthwhile as they are expecting only modest overlap between the people who attended DevCon and those attending AU 2025 (and there were only 60 seats in the class in Amsterdam, after all... a repeat in Nashville will certainly allow more folks to attend). The good news is that this second proposal was accepted, which means I'm almost certainly Nashville-bound for this year's Autodesk University.This leaves me in a somewhat new situation. For the first time since I can remember (and I’ve done some AU’s, over the years!) my main preparation for Autodesk University will be to move my content onto the official PowerPoint template. That’s it. I mean there are likely to be some new things I can share from the team’s work once September rolls around, but there won't be anything major to do in preparation for the event, aside from doing the recording in late August.
I admit to being a bit disappointed I won’t have the chance to talk about our team’s other work in a scheduled class - which I would have done if both proposals had been accepted… I don’t mean to be greedy! - but if you’re heading to Nashville and would like to learn more about what Autodesk Research is doing around understanding and predicting the human experience of design, please do reach out; I’d love to sit down and talk.
One slight wrinkle about this year’s AU is that it overlaps with the ANFA 2025 conference - being held in San Diego from September 18-20 by the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture - so I may find myself compromising on this year’s AU by leaving Nashville a day early. I do expect to be in Nashville from at least September 15-17: it may also be I head out late on the 18th, but it’s unlikely I’ll get to hang out at the closing party. Ah well.
