Hi, and welcome to the Neil Ashton Podcast.
In each episode, we explained some of the fascinating ways
that science and engineering are changing the world around us.
We talked to leading engineers from elite level sports like
cycling in Formula One to some of the world's top academics to
understand how fluid dynamics, machine learning, supercomputing
are bringing in a new era discovery.
We also hear some of their life stories, their career advice,
the lessons they've learned on the way that I hope will be
helpful to you too. So sit back and enjoy this
episode. Hi, and welcome back to the Neil
Ashton podcast. Apologies, this episode's a
couple of days late, but I was at the NVIDIA GTC conference in
Washington, DC, and it got me thinking to myself that maybe,
maybe it'd be good to do a quick episode just on the events, the
conferences, the places that I, I would recommend going to if
you wanted, you know, the continuing education to broaden
your horizons to learn more about what's, what's coming
next. Hopefully look at it from the
pure engineering CAECFD sort of angle and maybe also more on the
machine learning angle. And hopefully between the two,
you'll get some good events, maybe some of you listening to
this and go like, I know all this stuff.
I know about where to go to conferences, but I suspect there
are some. And I do get this asked a
reasonable ad time who yeah, maybe don't quite so often go to
these events. They don't come from that
background and want to know where should they go to get the
latest information. So I'll try and do that.
It'll be a short episode today. Maybe that's good for some
people who find some of the episodes are two hours long, a
bit difficult to get through. I do put chapters in now, which
I'm hoping helps a little bit, but I know that they can be
quite hard to get through in more in Mongo.
I am trying to work on doing some short versions of some.
So over hopefully the next couple of months, I'm going to
try and put some of the previous episodes I've got, but put them
out as like 1020 minute versions.
If you don't, you don't have a chance to watch the whole thing.
Listen to the whole thing. OK, so where would where would I
go? And maybe let's start from the
more from a industry point of view, you know, if you're
wanting to really learn about what's happening in the
aerospace industry, what's happening in space systems,
what's happening in aeronautics, you can't get away from the AI
AA events, The American Institute of Astronautics and
Aeronautics. Oh, it's aeronautics and
astronautics. I can never remember which way
around that is. These are held every January and
they're called, that's called SCYTEC and July, which is called
aviation. And these are an interesting
event because they're sort of a bridge between two.
You will see C-Suite of major engineering defense contractors,
governments there, you know, lockheeds and Raytheons and NASA
and others at at those events doing like very high level.
Even some like government officials will come and do
panels, etcetera. There's an exhibition floor.
But how I was always used to the AO AA is through quite technical
talks. And if you are somebody who
works in let's, yeah, let's say like aircraft design, you know,
that's the place to go. And some of the big workshops
there are incredibly useful. But I'll get to that in a
minute. So you can submit papers, They
get published as a conference paper, you know, very highly
regarded in the community. There is also a journal version
of it, Journal of aircraft, journal of, of other things
through the AI AA, you know, not that cheap to go to.
And being completely honest, you know, sometimes if you're not a
student, you're talking upwards of maybe $700.00 for, for the
fee. I think they've settled now on
Florida and San Diego as the places, but I would still highly
recommend. Fantastic for networking.
You will see all of the key people in the sort of aerospace
domain from ACFD and experimental point of view and
some structural work as well. Not as much on machine learning,
but that is starting to change. There's only one or two sessions
out of you know 10s or hundreds but slowly they are adding more.
There is an exhibition area. So if your company listening to
this, people do sponsor, it's not that big compared to let's
say a supercomputing or other type of events, but there
definitely is sort of commercial opportunities.
I'd say if you're a student, you should definitely go to one of
these. You know, the ability to bump
into people, ask questions. Technical talks are 30 minutes
long, I think, and or 20 to 30 minutes.
And the thing that I like the most about the AW are the
workshops, things like the highly prediction workshop, drag
prediction workshop, AI surrogate modelling workshop,
which I haven't actually been to yet, and whatever workshop there
was like an acoustics workshop. I'm forgetting others.
I'm being a bit biased to my area, but lots of workshops that
tend to happen either before or afterwards or sometimes in the
middle depending on the event. And those workshops are, I have
found the best because you basically got all of the things
in one place. They usually book out a room,
you're there for the whole day. When I think back, you know,
10-15 years ago for me, I met and learned the most from those,
which I really felt what was the community doing?
I just went to some random talks, not as much, but when it
was in the workshop because they often have like a, a workshop
summary. And that's part of the reason
that I interviewed people like Chris Rumsey in the past,
because what they've done for those workshops, you know, has
really been instrumental in helping people like me and
others to understand the area. And, and that's ultimately why I
go to a conference. I want to make a sense of what's
the community like? What's the, what are the
challenges? What's coming next?
What are The Who are the main people?
What's the main technologies? Just get to know people.
I mean, now for me, it's friends as well.
It's not just a a work thing, but I would say you can't beat
the AI AA conference if you're from a government background or
like defence. I mean, you always have to go to
those events because the, all the program managers from the
DoD, from the like Air Force go to those.
Again, Russ Cummings, that's why I interviewed him.
You know, he is key part of that area.
You'll probably see him almost all the AI AA.
So yeah, if you want to know what's going in aerospace, your
technical or your sort of C-Suite, I would definitely go
to the to the AR AA conferences. And by the way, this is clearly
not endorsed in any way by any of these conferences.
It's completely just my personal opinion, nothing to do with
NVIDIA or anybody else. I'd say then there are more sort
of niche workshops or events in the aerospace which have to date
normally been done by, by NASA. NASA has various workshops that
they'll tend to do with aerospace companies from ACFD
side, there were things like the High Fidelity workshop, there
was one in May, which was amazing, really, really good
event, had the opportunity to speak there.
And that was all the best sort of minds and and it was just a
great event. And sometimes they're not that
well advertised, so you have to look for them.
But if you were to Google like NASA Workshop CFD or NASA
Workshop Supersonic, you know, if you're looking for like
supersonic aircraft design or, or hypersonics or something.
So yeah, those are very good. I'm going to ask you to comment
maybe if you go, if you're on YouTube or you can send me a
message on LinkedIn, if I post this on LinkedIn to look at what
conferences to go to, because I'd like to know from you what
you think because I maybe I'm blindsided.
There are some in Europe and I'm forgetting the names of them
now, but I have to say, I find the AI AA ones pretty big.
And you know, European folks from Asia come as well from
Australia. Yeah, can't be the AI AA.
So how about the automotive side?
Well, I don't think there's anything like the AI AA for
automotive to be fair. Probably the closest would be
the SAE, which is the Society of Automotive Engineers.
It's probably the one that has, yeah, the closest connection,
probably a little bit more US centric and slightly less
participation at global level. I could be wrong, but at least
from my opinion, quite a lot of European folks go to a different
one, which is called FKFS, which I'll talk about in a second.
But if you look at SAE, so you know they have different tracks
and torques, so they have aero, acoustics, aerodynamics, engine
design, car design, systems crash, you know the whole
automotive from ACFD point of view.
There's often talks from the car companies and software suppliers
who who do it. I'd say the technical rigor is
maybe not as deep at the AR AA, but still still OK.
There is a journal attached to it, although I don't think it's
held in the same regard as the AI AA journal and personal
opinions here. But still, if you're trying to
understand the automotive community to understand what's
going on, you'll see, you know, some top designers and engineers
from these car companies there. There was an exhibition area.
So for you know, for commercial companies or start-ups wanting
to to go, that's also a good one.
And it's in April in Detroit every year.
So that's one, the European version.
I would say it's probably FKFS, which is through the wind
tunnel. FKFS, or at least I associate it
with the wind tunnel. Maybe it's a different entity,
which is I think every two years in Germany.
And that has, I'd say, you know, by definition more of a European
flavour to it, But influential people go to that event and has
more experimental or mixture of experimental got a quite a high
bar to get accepted there. So they don't just accept
everything and and it's a good community.
So that's probably on the European angle.
There is never one which is a little bit more now and again,
yeah, FKFS is still more experimental and CFD, whereas
CAE is broader. You can go to aero vehicles.
This is ACFD 1. I think that's also every two
years that is experimental in CFD.
It swaps around locations. That's not a bad one to go to.
Now I'm going to plug my own workshop that I set up with Gary
Page and now has got a great list of people and that's auto
CFD. So the Automotive CFD Protection
workshop, which was basically inspired by the AI AA workshops
that I spoke about, it's something I created in 2018 off
the back of seeing the AI AA and saying, hey, why isn't there
something like this for automotive?
You know, we're always doing these benchmarks, doing the CFD
stuff, but we don't have a place to go.
And so I pitched it for a little bit to get it done.
I was at Oxford at the time, so we hosted Oxford, Gary Adams at
Loughborough, we did that. And then in the second one,
Urquhart from Ford joined and he's gone from strength to
strength. And so auto CFD 5, it's going to
be next year. So it's usually every two years.
And that is a very focused discussion or CFD methodology.
I would like to say it does have all the main sort of CFD leads
from all the major car companies and software providers now, but
it is very focused on CFD. So if you're interested in the
FEA or anything like that, that's probably not the right
place, but it's I even if I wasn't organizing it, I think it
would be a great event for for you to go to so you can look
that one up. I would then maybe start to move
towards slightly less industrial ones and let's think more around
like the, the topics of the physics or the sub area.
So what I mean by that is you've got things like ETM, European
turbulence transition measurement is a, oh, I'm sorry,
embarrassing here. I know the acronyms.
That's more like a turbulence modelling one, often in a nice
place by the sea. And there's lots of through the
a cough TAC. So a cough TAC is a European
organization and they host lots of events.
In fact, there's a really good one coming up in March that I'm
helping out with, which is the ML for fluids.
So it's a really nice initiative to try and bring the machine
learning and the fluids communities together.
And that's in Amsterdam. So Richard Dwight is one of the
leading people there, professor there at Delph.
That's another one of these like workshop type ones, which
increasingly I like because they're typically less than 203
hundred people. They typically have some good
invited speakers, really focused discussions.
And considering the theme of this podcast is often around ML
and fluids or CFDI would definitely go because it's all
about trying to bring these two communities together.
It's mainly the fluids community, but more and more the
ML people are coming. And so workshops I think are
really good. Now if you are from, let's say
the CFD domain or aerodynamics and you go to the AA, AA and you
go to SAE and you go to some of the others.
What you probably aren't aware of unless you've got into this
is the ML conferences. Now the biggest one is Nurips
and EUR IPS, and I found out that's how you pronounce it, not
Nora, IPS, Nurips. There's a reason for that.
That's probably the biggest, most prestigious one where
actually just having a conference paper or even a
poster, it's seen as a big deal. I've been protected from that
several Times Now, annoyingly, but I have been and they have
lots of workshops as well, like AI for science, AI for physics.
Really good one to go to and I mean just thousands of people
sponsored by all the tech companies.
If you are into machine learning go, you'll be blown away by the
attendance there. Another one is iclear, that's
another sort of machine learning one.
And the other one is ICML. So between Europe's ICML and
iclear, those are the top ones. In fact, if you want to get a
job at Meta or one of the sort of tech companies, often you'll
see or, you know, NVIDIA in our like more research labs, you'll
see people say must have eye clear or nurse papers.
You know, it's seen as like the pinnacle from that field.
So if you've never been to one of them, highly go.
And especially the workshops, I organized one with a few people
eye clear and it was great. You get old people focused in
this room with posters, lots of young researchers as well.
And it's all around the world. They change location every year.
And it's, yeah, just all around the world.
There's a few then that I would say are now going down the more
like commercial route. And this is where, I don't know,
I sort of changed my mind halfway through when I was more
of a pure academic. I would look down upon these
events. So these are the ones like, you
know, your Siemens conference or your Answers conference or your
Dassault conference in like a vendor conference.
But they are quite good actually from a networking point of view
and from trying to like understand what's going on.
They increasingly now they do try and get some industry
speakers in from different companies.
I've given a talk a few of these.
They'll bring some start-ups in. They're good if you're more like
dealing from a a contracts point of view or or management point
of view. They're good from a networking
and you get to meet a lot of the key people and they could be a
good exposure for your company. So probably not so much on the
academic side, but they're not bad if your company wants to get
some more exposure and you're thinking from slightly more like
a technical marketing side, the bigger they often do ones now
all around the world. So they'll do like, you know, a
country Pacific version, but they they can be good.
And they often have like workshops to learn the software.
So if you want to get some of your younger staff to go there
and like learn how to use the software, they do that.
So yeah, what I was initially more skeptical of those, but I
think that if you pick the right one, they actually can be not
too bad from a tech point of view.
Then you have my first exposure to this was, well, actually
before we do that, maybe I'd go something like supercomputing.
I always think supercomputing is a good conference to go to,
especially now with convergence of AI and HPCI.
Wouldn't if you want to understand the technology, the
hardware and the sort of software level, but maybe a
little bit closer to the hardware side, they're great to
go to, very good from a networking point of view.
You know, all the hardware companies, all the vendors, all
the cloud companies, Christy, now a lot of the AI companies go
to supercomputing. It gets bigger and bigger and
bigger every year. That's a good one to go to,
especially if you're a company, you're a sponsor or put a booth
there. They have, of course, the Gordon
Bell Prize gets announced there. So it is quite prestigious.
There's lots of birds of a feather box panels, workshops.
So and it's, it's definitely a community vibe.
So it's a bit of a catch all. You know, it it, it's not a
specific discipline per SE. I guess HPC and supercomputing
covers lots of areas, but if you want to learn more about the
hardware, which I think is important, it's part of the
reason I moved to NVIDIA. I wanted to know more about the
the sort of coming from the bottom up where I guess if you
work for software company, you're sort of coming from the
top down. Good event to go to there is ISC
and Supercomputing Asia that are the European Asia feels to it.
Actually I went to the supercomputing in Europe.
It's a much smaller event, but again, actually pretty well
attended and had all most of the major people around.
And you know, it's good to talk to people and ask them what's
their opinion? What how are things moving?
OK. And what I would mean to say is
the tech companies, the my first exposure to this was reinvent
when I was at AWS and I was blown away by the size of this
event in Las Vegas. They book out all these hotels
and along the strip and there must be 10s of thousands of
people there, just massive. And I must admit it was really
good because they had so many workshops and in person events
where you could go and learn the software.
They had, you know, amazing keynotes top, you know, figures
from biggest companies in the world.
And and yeah, from a networking point of view, from a learning
point of view, you could do certifications there.
And then I saw, you know, Microsoft, I've never actually
been, but Microsoft do something, Google do something.
And you can't help but come away from these events feeling like,
wow, I have just understood a different part of the tech will.
And yeah, I guess going full circle, I just came back from
Nvidia's one of these GTC. And, you know, even if I wasn't
working for NVIDIA and when I asked people who have come to
and asked their opinion of it, you know, they were all blown
away and were like, this has helped me so much to understand
the, the tech landscape. I, I sort of understand what's
going on more now, of course you come in there to learn about
that particular company's technology, but you know, even
if you just watch one of these keynotes like like Jensen's
keynote, it, it does sort of open your eyes.
And, and that's certainly how I felt even before I joined.
So I think these events, these industry company events, whilst
you could be cynical and say, oh, they're just like marketing
events actually, especially for the tech companies that, you
know, got so big and have some influence on the world, They
actually, they do give you a lot of insight and it can inspire
you. And yeah, whether you're a
student trying to get a job, go that network, you can speak to
people. IA lot of people come up to me,
you know, who wanted to get some advice on their career or want
to know how to make the first steps.
You know, you can go and speak to these people, you can get
advice. If you e-mail people, are they
going to reply? If you send them a message on
LinkedIn, you know, it's hard. Whereas if you go to an event,
you can go up to them in person and, and get it so, and often
for students, there's discounts, etcetera.
So I, I would, I think I should have gone to more of those
events when I was younger. Actually, I don't think I did
enough of those. And I would, I would definitely
encourage it. So that was, yeah, I probably
missed out so many events and things that I'm probably going
to regret when I after I posted this.
But at least I've given you a bit of a flavour.
Maybe I'll come back to this and talk about others when I've had
more time to think about it, but as I said, I'll keep this one
sweet and short. And yeah, hope it was useful for
you.