Hi, and welcome to the Neil Ashton Podcast.
In each episode, we explain some of the fascinating ways
that science and engineering are changing the world around us.
We talk to leading engineers from elite level sports like
cycling and Formula One to some of the world's top academics to
understand how fluid dynamics, machine learning and
supercomputing are bringing in a new era of 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, CAE/CFD 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 amount of 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 one go. 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 10–20-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 AIAA events, the American
Institute of Aeronautics 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
SciTech 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
AIAA 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 AIAA, 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 a CFD 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 AIAA are the workshops, things like the
High Lift Prediction Workshop, drag prediction workshop, AIAA
Surrogate Modeling 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 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 AIAA 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 at
almost all the AIAA conferences. So yeah, if you want to know
what's going on in aerospace, whether you're technical or your
sort of C-Suite, I would definitely go to the to the AIAA
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 a CFD 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 AIAA ones pretty big. And you know, European folks
from Asia come as well from Australia.
Yeah, can't beat the AIAA. So how about the automotive
side? Well, I don't think there's
anything like the AIAA 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 talks, so they have aero, acoustics, aerodynamics, engine
design, car design, systems crash, you know the whole
automotive from a CFD 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 as at the AIAA, 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 AIAA 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 Stuttgart 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 a mixture of experimental and CFD.
It's got 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 another 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 AeroVEHICLES. This is a CFD 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 Prediction workshop, which was basically
inspired by the AIAA workshops that I spoke about, it's
something I created in 2018 off the back of seeing the AIAA 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 at Oxford. Gary Page 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 of 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 ETMM,
Engineering Turbulence Modelling and Measurements 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
ERCOFTAC. So ERCOFTAC 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 Delft.
That's another one of these like workshop type ones, which
increasingly I like because they're typically fewer than two
or three hundred 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 CFD.
I 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 AIAA 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 NeurIPS
and NeurIPS, and I found out that's how you pronounce it, not
NeurIPS, NeurIPS. 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 rejected 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 ICLR, that's another sort of machine learning
one. And the other one is ICML.
So between NeurIPS ICML and ICLR, 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 ICLR or
NeurIPS papers. You know, it's seen as like the
pinnacle from that field. So if you've never been to one
of them, highly recommend you go.
And especially the workshops, I organized one with a few people
ICLR and it was great. You get all 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 Ansys 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 HPC.
I. 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.
Increasingly 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 talks, 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 and Asian
equivalents 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 re:Invent 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 world.
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 there, network, you can speak to
people. A 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 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.