AECtech+ 2024 | Los Angeles

Thank you to everyone who attended the 2024 AECtech+ Los Angeles!

On September 20-22, the University of Southern California hosted the second AECtech+ Los Angeles.

Workshops

The event began with a series of morning workshops hosted by CORE studio at USC.

CORE studio | Transforming Text: Practical NLP for the AEC Industry

Seyedomid Sajedi | Associate AI/ML Engineer @ CORE studio

AEC professionals often spend significant time reviewing various documents, which can be quite time-consuming. The goal of this half-day workshop is to explore a range of techniques in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and familiarize attendees with tools that can enhance their productivity when dealing with large documents.

Classical ML and NLP

Setup and Essentials: We'll begin by setting up a Python environment and learning the essentials of leveraging a local machine or cloud service (such as Google Colab) to perform NLP tasks.

Techniques and Methods: Explore simple yet effective ML and non-ML methods for automated processing of textual information.

Deep Learning and LLMs

Advanced Methods: Focus on advanced NLP techniques that leverage modern deep learning architectures, such as Transformers.

Understanding and Application: Gain insights into how large language models (LLMs) and AI semantics work and investigate practical applications such as topic modeling and deriving insights from large corpora of data.

CORE studio | Swiftlet, Calling Web API’s from Grasshopper3d.

Sergey Pigach | Senior Associate Applications Engineer @ CORE studio

This workshop will introduce Swiftlet, a Grasshopper plugin that lets you make web requests directly from your GH definition. Utilizing web services and external APIs opens up unique opportunities for data scraping, cloud computing, and live data processing within your favorite modeling software. Swiftlet provides a streamlined workflow for sending GET, POST, DELETE, PUT, and PATCH requests to any API endpoint. Participants will learn how to gain advanced control over request headers, query params, web authentication, and parsing JSON and will explore how this capacity can be extended further by hosting Grasshopper definition on cloud computing platforms and integrating machine learning models into a microservice approach to AEC design.

Symposium

Friday afternoon concluded with an inspirational set of presentations from a mix of local and international Institutions, Software Companies, and AEC firms.

CORE studio | Thornton Tomasetti

Sophie Moore | Senior Applications Developer

Eesha Jain | Computational Designer

The University of Southern California

Dr. David Gerber | Professor of Practice, Program Director

SUMPOINT.io & Hathaway Dinwiddie

James Coleman | Co-Founder @ SUMPOINT.io

Brian Murray | Senior Project Engineer @ Hathaway Dinwiddie

HYPAR

Ian Keough | CEO & Co-Founder

HKS

Cory Brugger | Partner & CTO

Morphosis

Kerenza Harris | Associate Principal

Stantec

Cory Hill | Associate

Martin Bros. Construction

Andrew Kragness | Director of Computational Design

Hackathon

Over the course of 24 hours, over 30 participants pitched ideas and competed in 5 teams for the Best Overall & Most Collaborative hackathon prizes.

Symposium Presentation by Kerenza Harris of Morphosis

Hackathon Winners

BEST OVERALL HACK

FAM JAM

FAM JAM is a Revit Plugin developed during the 2024 AECTech Hackathon. We created a solution aimed at simplifying specification sheet management for Revit, targeting architectural workflows. Fam Jam allows users to seamlessly integrate Revit families with specification sheets, addressing a common bottleneck by turning families into specs, making the process more intuitive and efficient.

Team: Nehansh Saxena / SLAM, Frank (Xu) Li / Sainful Bouquet, Omid Sajedi / CORE studio

BEST COLLABORATIVE HACK

Magic Tape

The Magic Tape is an electronic measurement solution based on a simple smartphone app and an affordable electronic measurement device. It's designed to enhance the precision of AR-based systems on construction sites by providing real-time, accurate measurements.

Team: James Coleman / Sumpoint.io, Soomeen Hahm / USC, Poorva Joshi / Morphosis, Brian Murray / Hathaway - Dinwiddie, Sergey Pigach / CORE studio, Callum Sykes / McNeel

Vibe Scout

VibeScout is an application that lets users find areas in LA that are similar to their input. All you have to do is input an address, and the application will return the top five most similar areas based on properties such as green spaces, restaurants, cultural attractions, and much more.

Team: Sophie Moore / CORE studio, Ryland Chase / USC, Brandon Yu, Will Buckser-Schulz / USC, Jacob Blitzer / KHS&S Contractors

Auto Park

Auto Park is a study that aims to streamline the parking lot design process by automating 3D model generation using client-provided 2D data.

Team: Eesha Jain / CORE studio, Lucien du Chaxel / Royal 4 Systems, Danny Tran / Royal 4 Systems, Brendan Wong / Royal 4 Systems, Ariana Chen / Walter P Moore, Srikrishnan Madhavan / Thornton Tomasetti

Endless Bytes

Endless Bytes, or Your Data Needs a Friend, lets users quickly query metrics and summaries of models from Autodesk Forma using GPT 4.0.

Team: Shirley Zhang / ARUP, Anik Alam / Mithun, Rahman Ismail / Mithun

Judges

Hackathon entries were judged by an esteemed panel of industry & academic leaders

Dr. David Gerber | Professor of Practice, Program Director @ USC
Doug Neri | Senior Associate @ Stantec
Kewei Sui | Machine Learning Engineer @ Snap
Alex Pollock | Senior Director of CORE studio @ Thornton Tomasetti, CORE studio

Special Thanks

Thank you to the following people who made the event possible and made it a great experience.

University of Southern California | Event Host.

Stantec | Sponsorship

And a special thank you to Dr. David Gerber for coordinating the venues and making the event possible.

CORE studioSeptember 30, 2024