Through the Interface

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 →

Toronto

Last Monday I left my son in Baltimore and headed back to Dulles for a short flight to Toronto to attend internal meetings with our research team. I didn't feel like fighting public transport for 3+ hours to get from Baltimore to Dulles, so took the easy (and much more relaxing) path of taking an Uber. I was there in less than 90 minutes - a not insignificant time saving. I really wish it was more convenient to take public transport here. The flight to Pearson was short - a little over an hour in the air - and... Read more →

Back in Baltimore

I mentioned last time that I was going to be busy preparing and delivering a number of presentations. I’m happy to say that crazy period has mostly come to a close. It was marked on Friday with the recording of the Autodesk University 2024 class that Håvard Høiby and I will be delivering again soon in San Diego. It was a lot of fun preparing and delivering this class with Håvard, I must say. And I think people are going to really engage with the content (especially the information about Forma’s extension framework and SDK). Be sure to check... Read more →

Transitioning from summer mode

Life seems to have shifted quite radically this week, as the summer here in Switzerland starts drawing to a close. A Sunday morning storm reset the temperature to something more autumnal (although these are looking to climb again gradually - we’re not completely done with warm days here, thankfully) and all of my three children started their respective schools again on Monday. The two youngest are once again in the same institution - they’re in the first and last years of our local “lycée” (the Denis-de-Rougement in Neuchâtel), which is the three years of post-mandatory schooling that often precedes... Read more →

DC and Baltimore

I haven’t been the the US purely for personal reasons for quite some time. The last time was probably on our round-the-world trip, and interestingly our first stop was in Washington DC. I’ve just flown across to Dulles, to help my sone get settled into his exchange university. I always love seeing the crazy elevator bus transport system that I haven’t yet seen anywhere else in the world. It’s like you’re in some strange parallel universe where this kind of futuristic system became widespread, back in the day. What I like less about Dulles is the immigration queue. We... Read more →

5 awesome VASA project ideas for the AU2024 Dynamo Hackathon

[My apologies for the click-baity title. I do actually have a list of 5 cool project ideas, if you scroll down the post. So it’s not completely dishonest, at least.] In the last post I mentioned a few classes you can sign up for (and that I’m directly or indirectly involved in) from the Tuesday to Thursday of the AU2024 week (October 15th-17th) in San Diego. I now have something to recommend for the Monday of that week, too! In the past we’ve often had pre-events at AU2024: I wasn’t sure whether there would be one this year or... Read more →

Sign up for AU2024 classes today! Here are some suggestions.

The class catalog for Autodesk University 2024 has been live for a week or two already, with attendees being able to bookmark sessions ahead of the ability to enroll fully. Well, today’s the day that enrollment opens properly, so have at it! Classes often fill up quickly, so doing it sooner can certainly be better than waiting. I also have a few suggestions if you’re at a loss for what to choose. These are all classes that I or my research team are involved in, of course. That’s just how things work around here. :-) It turns out there’s... Read more →

Dorset and London

In the last post I wrote about our recent time in Brittany and Cornwall. Something I find very striking about the English countryside is the thatching on (some of) the rooves. This also apparently exists in Brittany, but seems to be more rare. I'd been speculating about the amount of upkeep needed on a thatched roof and then we came across one being replaced. I suppose you could call it a cottage industry! (Groan.) It turns out a thatched roof can last as long as 40 years - if maintained well - although the ridge will probably need replacing... Read more →