A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

AU2016 Keynote – Machine Intelligence and Software for Teams

AU2016 Keynote – Machine Intelligence and Software for Teams
Oleg
Oleg
16 November, 2016 | 2 min for reading

carl-bass-vision

I attended Autodesk University 2016 opening keynote yesterday. 10’000 people crowd, crazy loud music and future vision of engineering software. Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski and CEO Carl Bass kicked it off sharing perspective on future trends and opportunities of technologies and engineering software future.

The following  2 topics caught my special attention Machine Learning and Software for Teams

Machine Learning and Artifical Intelligence

These days we can observe an accelerated interest into AI research and machine learning development. A growing capability to crunch a massive amount of data is one of the key driving forces behind that. The idea of Autodesk to feed network of computers with information about 3D models and get insight and essence of the designs engineers work and use it for optimal design and planning. Jeff brought few examples of projects Autodesk CTO office made using this approach and the outcome – optimal design forms, materials selection and planning. Carl Bass continued the story discussing how Machine Learning can be used as a software approach for the future design automation.

machine-learning

The central part of this model – Design Graph can recognize he design based on shape and show the designer all things that look like and related to it. If designer selects bolt, software show him nuts and washers. Software also can make a good guess about designer will do next.

engineering-search

Software for Teams

According to Carl Bass, old paradigm of engineering software was to develop software for individual engineers and designers. Nothing wrong with that – most of engineering software today is exactly like that helping engineers to perform 3D design, simulations, CNC machining, etc. However, the new paradigm is coming – software for teams. It brings 2 important elements – collaboration and shared data. Autodesk is looking into the way to develop software capable to communicate changes, anticipate needs and react on changing environment. This is the main charter behind cloud tools Autodesk is developing today. Sharing data is a central element of “software for teams” approach helping users to work around a specific context and actions.

software-for-teams1

What is my conclusion? I will use Carl Bass analogy of automotive industry. There are companies and cars that define the industry vision for the next 10 years. Take Mercedes Benz S-class as an example. The features you can see in that car will be available in an average mainstream car in 10 years. Autodesk keynote reminded me a bit of the same. We see an unprecedented level  innovation coming into engineering software these days. At the same time, many companies are struggling for a very basic functions that can improve their work every day. How to keep the balance? This is a question to ask industry strategists and analysts. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
8 July, 2009

One of the things I see very important is user adoption. We can develop brilliant technologies, but if nobody  uses...

24 August, 2012

I’m preparing myself for Social PLM 2012 virtual conference in 2 weeks. It is a time to re-think all what...

13 July, 2017

Unless you live under the rock, you know what is SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). It was style of software design...

2 February, 2025

Have you heard about the concept of “data products”? I’ve been following different topics related to data and related technologies...

14 May, 2022

Manufacturing companies are always looking for ways to improve their operations and increase efficiency. One way to do this is...

6 October, 2009

What I want to discuss today is PLM Best Practices. Frankly saying, my thoughts about the topic were accelerated by...

2 January, 2013

Open source is one of the PLM trends I covered in the past in my blog. I wanted to come back...

13 November, 2022

People don’t want something really new. They want to have something they are familiar with but work differently. In today’s...

24 August, 2009

You can ask me – why would you like to talk about trends? Trends are something normally going toward an...

Blogroll

To the top