Through the Interface

A meeting of former Autodeskers in Neuchâtel

Yesterday evening I popped along to La Cantine in Colombier to attend a get-together of former Autodesk Neuchâtel employees. I was only expecting a few people to be there, but there must have been somewhere between 50 and 100 of my former colleagues there during the course of the evening. La Cantine is a restaurant run by an old friend and former Autodesker, Antonio Barroca, and I’ve mentioned both Antonio and his restaurant in the past. If you’re ever in the Neuchâtel region, do stop by for some great food with a wonderful atmosphere. Here’s Antonio fanning the flames... Read more →

Register today for Autodesk DevCon 2023 in SF

An Autodesk DevCon is coming back to San Francisco in 2023! It will be held on September 6th and 7th at Pier 9, between the Klamath Ferry and our Technology Center. Photo © The Bay Area Council Foundation It’s worth noting that there is a fee to attend the event (this is currently $150 but will increase to as much as $300 on the day of the event). Space is limited, given the venue, so it is worth registering as soon as you know you can attend – there’s a very good chance that we won’t have tickets left... Read more →

It’s the last day to submit class proposals for Autodesk University 2023

The CFP period for this year’s AU has simply flown by – mainly because it’s turned out to be a busy period between personal milestones and work travel – and today (May 15th) is the last day to submit your proposals for the event. Over the weekend I went ahead and finalised last-minute changes to mine and clicked submit. The titles (as shown above) are: Monitoring and visualizing data from the MX3D and Dar Smart Bridges Channeling Minecraft to analyze architectural spaces with VASA and Dynamo Both are variations on proposals I submitted for last year’s event (but obviously... Read more →

TechX 2023 in Dallas

Last week I was in Dallas, Texas, for TechX 2023, Autodesk’s annual internal event for technical and design staff. As the technical content shared at the event is company confidential, I’m mostly sharing pictures of people I had the good fortune to hang out with, during the course of the week. There was quite a bit of “real” work going on, too, though, so hopefully you won’t come away with the impression that it was just a week-long party. Ahem. As there’s no direct flight to Dallas from Switzerland, I chose to fly via Heathrow from Geneva on the... Read more →

Putting the TechX in Texas

I’m packing my bags soon for another trip across the pond for our annual, Autodesk-internal geekfest, TechX 2023. This year’s event is being held in Dallas, Texas, a city I haven’t visited in perhaps 20 years. I’m sure a lot has changed – we’ll see! Photo credit: Robert Hensley, CC license. In any case TechX isn’t about the venue – or even about the technical content, which, while often really interesting, is also watchable remotely during and after the event – as much as the chance to (re)connect with people. In that sense it’s similar to the Autodesk University... Read more →

Submit your class proposal for Autodesk University 2023 today

It’s that time of year again: the Call for Proposals for AU 2023 is now open! This year’s event is back in Las Vegas – it’s being held at The Venetian from November 13th-15th. Interestingly this is a Monday to Wednesday slot, presumably to avoid overlap with the Las Vegas Formula 1 Grand Prix. I expect it’s going to be very hard to find a hotel room in Las Vegas after AU is over, this year! I always find that the best way to be sure to get to AU is to get a class accepted, something that didn’t... Read more →

Building the future of AI infrastructure with Autodesk software

It’s been really exciting – and sometimes even overwhelming – to see the fast-paced developments in the space of Generative AI over the last few months. It’s clear that Large Language Models (LLMs) and other AI systems are increasingly playing a key role in our Future of Work. One thing that’s often glossed over is the need for human input when building and refining these models: aside from being trained on vast datasets generated from websites and the broader internet, huge teams of people are helping train these AI models, providing “human processing within a computational framework”, to quote... Read more →

The APS Sustainability Accelerator in Copenhagen

On Sunday night I headed to Geneva airport to take a late flight to Copenhagen for a special Sustainability-focused APS Accelerator. I knew something was up with my flight when at 7:49pm the gate information that was promised to be shown at 7:25pm still wasn’t posted. (This is Switzerland. Something was badly wrong with this scenario.) It turns out the inbound flight from Nice was delayed by an hour, which meant our flight to Copenhagen would arrive at midnight rather than 11pm. Walking through Copenhagen’s beautiful airport at that time of night was highly surreal. It was completely deserted.... Read more →

Dynamo Office Hours showing Space Analysis and VASA

Last week Rhys Goldstein and I had a blast joining Sol Amour and Jacob Small during the Dynamo Office Hours session on Packages of Note, something I mentioned in a recent post. We spent some time stepping through a few samples for both Space Analysis and VASA, to give a rough sense of what’s involved in using each. Next week I’m heading over to Denmark for the first half of the week, where I’ll be attending the APS Sustainability Accelerator in Copenhagen. If you’re going to be in Copenhagen next week and want to meet up for a chat,... Read more →

A student design challenge: Make It Bridge

Over on Instructables there’s a student design challenge featuring the 5m Dar Smart Bridge. It’s called “Make It Bridge”, and the idea is that contestants – who have to be students aged between 13 and 21 and based in the USA or Canada (excluding Quebec, for some reason) – can place the geometry of the Dar bridge, or another bridge of their choosing, in surroundings to which it adds value. It sounds like a lot of fun. I like the guidance given: In choosing the site for the bridge, you might consider what it would look like from below... Read more →

And the Oscar for best commercial goes to… Otto Desć!

Yesterday’s Oscar ceremony was punctuated by a series of commercials (or adverts, as we call them back home) by Autodesk. The first few paid homage to a mythical filmmaker/visual effects specialist named Otto Desćinski – or Otto Desć to his friends. It was only during the third segment that the secret was unveiled, that the series was really all about Autodesk. Here’s the extended cut, showing content from all three segments: The whole thing was really nicely executed: Ryan Reynolds’ creative agency, Maximum Effort, were behind it, and our new Chief Marketing Officer, Dara Treseder, clearly played a role.... Read more →

This year’s snow week

I think I’ve mentioned in the past that in Switzerland the annual winter half-term break – the Winterferien or semaine blanche – is basically meant for skiing or snowboarding. Or sledging, I suppose. The canton of Neuchatel has its Republic Day on March 1st, so the holiday week always falls to include this day (other cantons have theirs sometime earlier in February). Frankly, with the shifting seasons, this is starting to feel a little late – snow is far from guaranteed, these days, at this time of year, and this winter season turned out to be exceptionally dry in... Read more →

APS Accelerator in Copenhagen with a focus on Sustainability

Just as one APS Accelerator is wrapping up (this week’s was held in-person in Pune, India and virtually around the world), it’s time to think ahead to the next. And this next one is quite special. It’s being held in the beautiful city of Copenhagen from March 20-24, 2023, and will have a particular focus on Sustainability. Our friends at Ramboll will be hosting the event at their gorgeous Head Office in the Ørestad neighbourhood of Copenhagen. A fantastic location for an Accelerator! Image courtesy of Ramboll If you have an idea for an impactful, sustainability-related project – perhaps... Read more →

Death of the Metaverse. Come work on XR at Autodesk!

You don’t have to look far, these days, to find dire prognostications about the death of the Metaverse. That’s the nature of the hype cycle: those without the patience to help push technology through the Trough of Disillusionment move on to other things. Although the speed with which the Metaverse passed the Peak of Inflated Expectations in 2022 is impressive. Interestingly the Gartner Hype Cycle for 2016 reported Virtual Reality as having emerged onto the Slope of Enlightenment, but even at this time I felt this was premature. These models do have to be seen as what they are:... Read more →

Facility Monitoring beta in Autodesk Tandem

Some huge news was dropped by the Autodesk Tandem team, last week. Their Facility Monitoring feature is now available to Tandem customers as a Beta release. This is effectively the culmination of more than a decade of our research into contextualising sensor (IoT) data inside 3D (mainly BIM) environments. It started through Project Dasher in late 2009, which – passing by our work on Dasher 360 from 2016 – led to the creation of the APS (formerly Forge) viewer’s Data Visualization Extension in 2020-21. In this latest phase, Dasher has inspired the Tandem team to build out Dasher-like features... 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 →

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 →