CORE studio hosted the 2017 AEC Technology Symposium and Hackathon in New York City on October 19-22. It was our largest AEC Tech event to date with over 150 people attending the symposium, and over 100 people attending the hackathon. Attendees came from all over the world including: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco, London, Switzerland, Tokyo, and Egypt. A variety of AEC companies was represented including: SHoP Architects, Perkins + Will, Tocci Construction, HOK, Affiliated Engineers, Radius Track, Dar Group, Foster and Partners, NBBJ Architecture, Ennead Architects, Permasteelisa, Skanska, Rossetti, McNeel, Autodesk, wework, and more.

The week of events started off with a full day of supplementary workshops at the Thornton Tomasetti office which allowed attendees to develop on their current skill sets and explore new tools and workflows. The workshops sold out at over 70 attendees and all sessions were completely full. Attendees had the opportunity to take a variety of classes including D3.js and Visualization, Dynamo and Revit, Konstru, Kangaroo Physics, Human UI, Autodesk Forge, and Speckle. Workshops were hosted by Mostapha Roudsari, Konrad Sobon, Chris Mackey, Nick Mundell, Emil Poulsen, Brian Ringley, Andrew Heumann, Jaime Rosales Duque, and Dimitrie Stefanescu.

For the first time in AEC Tech history, CORE studio introduced a theme for the symposium, “Merging and Emerging: AEC Futures”. The theme investigated opportunities in implementing cross-industry tech and discuss emerging AEC technology through three vectors: Site Futures (Robotics, Sensing, AR and Mixed Reality), Practice Futures (Cross-disciplinary collaboration, Machine Learning and AI), and Facilities Futures (Integration of sensing and data logging for the Built Environment).

We welcomed speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds such as academia, kinetic art, virtual reality, custom software, machine intelligence, engineering, and research and development. Speakers included: Jonatan Schumacher, Ben Howes, Brian Ringley, Andrew Heumann, Cecilie Brandt-Olsen, Branko Glisic, Sarah Oppenheimer, Naomi Maki, Norman Richardson, Ana Garcia Puyol, Randy Deutsch, and Friederike Schuur. The full symposium schedule, description of talks, and speaker bios can be read here.

AEC Tech 2017 was the first hackathon on Cornell Tech’s brand new NYC campus, lasting 30-hours and resulting in 16 new open-source projects, all attempting to tackle pressing issues in the AEC industry with innovative computational solutions. A conclusive list of final projects and links can be found here. (Read more about the Hackathon)

The success of the 2017 events are in part due to our workshop, symposium, and hackathon sponsors: Autodesk, Autodesk Forge, HKS Line, IrisVR, Konstru, wework, Bad Monkeys, Ladybug, and Speckle.

We want to thank everyone for attending the events, participating with open minds, promoting the event, and maintaining the infectious energy that keeps us all coming back every year! If you have any suggestions of what you would like to see next year, please email us and let us know!

Videos from the symposium presentations can be viewed on our YouTube Channel! Please enjoy a few symposium photos below and you can find more here.

Photos courtesy of Jon Taylor Photography

2017 AEC Tech - merging and emerging!