Through the Interface

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Counting down to AU 2022

There’s now just a month to go before many will be travelling to New Orleans for the first in-person Autodesk University since 2019. Aside from being back at event with 10,000 or so attendees – something many of us may well have forgotten how to do, including myself – this year’s event will be different from those in recent years as it’s being held somewhere other than Las Vegas. In Vegas it’s possible to have that many people (give or take) hosted along with a full conference – including a significant exhibition space and somewhere to feed the hungry... Read more →

The first anniversary of the MX3D Bridge installation

While I was out on holiday, I received a newsletter from MX3D that I thought worth sharing here, too. It highlighted the fact that a year (actually 13 months, by this point) has already passed since the MX3D Bridge was installed in downtown Amsterdam. How time flies! The MX3D team put together this really nice video that shows details of the bridge’s design, construction and installation: Here’s the content of the newsletter article in question, © MX3D: We’re very happy to celebrate the first anniversary of the installation and public opening of the MX3D Bridge! We are looking back... Read more →

Of hiking and climbing

I’m back from our 2-week summer break, which we spent this year in Switzerland and Germany. The majority of the first week was spent up in the Bernese Oberland, a region we enjoy immensely. We were there all together – I was with my wife and our three kids – but in the mornings the “grown ups” left the kids to sleep in while we walked up to the centre of Adelboden. This was partly to give our puppy, Daisy, a bit of exercise… … but also because we love having a quiet breakfast at Haueter, considered one of... Read more →

A special unveiling at AU 2022

The Autodesk Research team is currently printing something very special in our Boston Technology Center with the hope of it being displayed at Autodesk University 2022 in New Orleans. I expect to be spending quite a bit of time near this object, during the event, and am very much looking forward to it. Even at this early stage it’s already a thing of great beauty. Now for some pre-AU fun and games: if you can guess the object’s function and how much it’ll weigh once finished – within an as-yet-undetermined threshold – then I’ll send you a souvenir from... Read more →

An eventful start to the summer

It’s been some time since I’ve shared any personal news, so I thought I’d throw a whole load of it together in an easily ignorable post. I’ve structured this post on themes, rather than chronologically, as it feels more coherent that way. The summer has been lovely this year, in Switzerland, which is in stark contrast to last year’s horror show. We haven’t been away anywhere much – as yet, at least – but I’ll explain more about that a bit later on. For us the summer thus far has largely been about music. We’ve taken the opportunity to... Read more →

Register now for Autodesk University 2022. I may even see you there!

Registration is now open for this year’s AU: the first time it’s been held in-person since 2019, and in a brand new city (for AU, at least), New Orleans. It’s being held from September 27th to 29th, which will be here really soon! The early-bird pricing of $1,750 is available until July 23rd, at which point it slides upwards to $1,999 until August 12th and then on up to the full price of $2,250 from there. And if you can’t make it in person to the event, there’s still the option to attend virtually for free. Registration for the... Read more →

3D printing with recycled PET at Autodesk London

I’m in London for a few days this week for some internal meetings and a customer visit. While visiting the Soho office I checked in with my Autodesk Research colleague Allin Groom about a project he and Matt Oosthuizen have undertaken to help reduce the impact of waste in the office. The inspiration for the project was an all too common problem: a lot of waste generated by employees – many of whom buy takeaway lunches at local shops and restaurants – comes in the form of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers. While this material is nominally recyclable, Allin and... Read more →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →