The Neil Ashton Podcast
The Conference Connection (HPC, CAE, ML & Engineering)
Episode overview
In this episode, Neil Ashton discusses various conferences and workshops in the automotive, aerospace, and machine learning fields. He highlights the importance of these events for networking, education, and staying updated with industry trends. From the SAE and AIAA events to machine learning workshops, Neil provides insights into what attendees can expect and the value of participating in these gatherings.
Transcript
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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.