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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.

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 surprised) that I came back from such a large event without bringing home Covid. (I managed to do so 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!)

Having the kids’ holidays come right after a week out of the office isn’t exactly ideal from a work perspective, but I did feel the break was much needed after a hectic AU week.

This year we decided to stay within Switzerland, mainly because our puppy doesn’t yet have a passport: it requires some inoculations we haven’t had time to get for her. We also didn’t want to go too far, as our eldest is just settling into his new life at University in Lausanne, so we wanted to be able to visit him during the break, too.

So we did the next best thing to going to Italy – and some might argue it’s even better, but that’s a question of perspective – and that’s to head to Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of the Switzerland.

We decided to break the journey on the way out by visiting Ballenberg, the Swiss Open-Air Museum.

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 Blum and Andrew Anagnost giving it a try.

I can now confirm that there is a clear winner of the “competition” I launched in the teaser post.

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 past, architects achieved this through their own intuition and adherence to building codes and standards that support the occupants’ needs. In recent years, the AEC industry is pushing to involve occupants earlier and more often in the design process. This human-centric approach to building design will still consider cost, schedule, energy and more, but creating healthier spaces for people will take center stage.

Our team of researchers intends to encourage human-centric design by providing better tools. This could include providing better indicators for human-centricity like comfort or safety. We will define “soft metrics” – relating to things like comfort, well-being, habitability and perhaps even productivity – that might be integrated into a traditional design process. Focusing on human-centric building design will also include exploring tools that encourage and streamline broader stakeholder and occupant feedback during the design process. Perhaps this means using existing and future generative tools that support more interactive and collaborative workflows.

There’s a lot of supporting technology and exploration that will go into this effort. For simulation, we’re looking to harness spatial analysis toolkits such as VASA to assess proximity and visibility. Also, we expect to use ontologies to define and access semantic information about buildings. With sensing, we’re looking at capturing data from our Living Lab in Toronto to validate assumptions and to learn more about occupant behaviours. We’ll probably use digital twin technology such as Project Dasher to visualize the data. We want to use reinforcement learning along with other ML techniques to explore emergent occupant behaviours by placing intelligent agents in a variety of spaces. We also want to support the creation of spaces that evolve over time, whether via near-term re-configuration or as the needs of successive generations of occupants shift.

In case you’re interested in learning more about this effort at Autodesk University 2022 in New Orleans, please drop me a note and we’ll find some time to chat. (We can also connect separately if you’re not attending, but at this stage that may not happen until sometime in mid-October.)

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:

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.