If everyone is saying AI/LLM then that ship already sailed.
Ikr, I don't know why that is being mentioned. If someone suggested AI five years ago. it would have been emerging then.
What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
61–68 of 68 posts
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also quite fun! There's a lot of computational geometry involved and you have a chance to positively affect the built environment around you. We're quite close now to delivering the final version of IFC4.3: the open standard for BIM (building information modelling), now including semantic modelling of long linear infra https://ifc43-docs.standards.buildingsmart.org/ Eagerly awaiting to replace your PDF.
Since you are an insider, would you please shed some light on a personal question I've had for a while? Is the reason the IFC specification is so extremely complicated because they're trying to map nicely to an object model that's already in Autodesk products? I read a proposal a while ago to simplify an open BIM spec down to meshes for solids and a generic dictionary for attaching property data. That struck me as ve…
This is a difficult question and the the history to all of this predates my involvement.
Indeed, a fair amount of people believe that the IFC is intentionally unnecessarily complex to limit interoperability and retain a monopoly.
Over time, I've come to believe hanlon's razor is also in play here and it's more of a poor understanding of use cases, academic ideas blowing up scope and inheriting obscure schema and serialization tech.
Meshes + metadata can facilitate most of the use cases in industry today, which is coordination, interference checks and visualization.
But at the same time, there's some pretty compelling use of the standard that requires slightly more semantic geometry descriptions:
- calculating geometric quantities according to local norms, which requires some additional geometric knowledge on things like openings and the axis of a wall for example
- The opening direction of doors is often good to know, but this is just a convention on the local transformation matrix, so could be just meshes.
- steel manufacturing can derive quite a bit of information from the IFC geometry, like parametric cross section profiles and where to drill for bolt holes and using which diameter
And then there is the ultimate end goal according to some to be able to exchange all parametric and constraint information from the native model. But this is still quite far out.
The challenge for future editions of the spec is to better align required complexity of certain use cases with a more modular spec so that you depend on a more appropriate amount of complexity.
Btw. since you mention Blender. The BlenderBIM addon https://blenderbim.org/ is actually one of the most avid users of complex and parametric constructs in IFC :)
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#63AI. AI! Did I mention ai? Srsly go into ai. Start learning what is already here (so much) learn to use it, learn to fine-tune it and if you then still not busy enough: learn to really understand ai architecture.
But hasn't AI boomed already? If you said this 5 years ago, then it would be called emerging tech but now it's already here with many practitioners already.
Nope.
The industry is adding ai right now left and right.
This takes time and experts.
And all the small companies probably haven't even touched it.
And currently there is no end in sight. The r&d progress is still as high as not higher than yesterday.
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#641. Genetics and Genomics. The researchers I have worked with closely in the past have been outstanding scientists who have highlighted a huge room for computer engineers to step in and reap the benefits of applying software engineering and to a large extent - algorithms to solve large scale problems in the quantitative aspects of genetics and genomics. To give you a broad example, such methods are used in the breedin…
In your given example, I know it's more complicated than that but it is basically an optimization algorithm, right?
I unfortunately don’t have the detailed picture, but only several layman’s view of the problems they were working on.
From what I understood, a lot of their research involved pattern recognition in strings of the size of about 4-6 GiB, combinatorics of smaller patterns, classification across multiple samples etc. I kept thinking these are elegantly solved problems in other domains, and if one were to possess both the skills of algorithms and the knowledge of what is it they are looking for, then it can click for a win.
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#65• Spacial Computing This is definitely an emerging field that is trying to develop market share. Unclear if the tech is really there in the long haul for comfortable spacial computing though. What you're seeing now is literally akin to something like the Apple I being released. We have a LONG road to go but there's very little doubt that the end goal is something powerful. • AI Duh? It's useful now, and likely will o…
Glassesless spatial computer you might not be familiar with: Http://voxon.co (disclosure: founded the company ) Http://look.glass (disclosure: worked at company) Http://lightfieldlabs.com Http://leiainc.com
Wow! These companies are building awesome tech!
Has demand for 3D tech like this increased since you started Voxon?
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since you are an insider, would you please shed some light on a personal question I've had for a while? Is the reason the IFC specification is so extremely complicated because they're trying to map nicely to an object model that's already in Autodesk products? I read a proposal a while ago to simplify an open BIM spec down to meshes for solids and a generic dictionary for attaching property data. That struck me as ve…
This is a difficult question and the the history to all of this predates my involvement. Indeed, a fair amount of people believe that the IFC is intentionally unnecessarily complex to limit interoperability and retain a monopoly. Over time, I've come to believe hanlon's razor is also in play here and it's more of a poor understanding of use cases, academic ideas blowing up scope and inheriting obscure schema and seri…
IFCOpenShell was news to me. Thanks for sharing. You're doing God's work.
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#67There's a ton of interesting things to do and important problems to be solved in information security. Think of this as the ecosystem of safety in software and systems.
Could you elaborate?
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#68Remember when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and its own appstore? And how developing mobile apps is now its own field? A new interface is ripe for development. Once a user is used to such a clear and intuitive UI, they can't go back. And GPT technology is exactly that. ChatGPT is the herald of the new era UI.
I am confused. What is the mobile app-equivalent for GPTech?