COFES 2008 - Day 1

Deelip Menezes reports for WorldCAD Access from COFES 2008:

COFES 2008 started Thursday afternoon with presentations on varied topics, the first by Kathleen Maher from Jon Peddie Research. She spoke on "The Practicality Gap" -- the causes for good products failing.

Second was Ken Hall from Gensler, who spoke on "The Sustainability Paradox". He painted a sad picture of how we are using our resources as a civilization, and what we need to do to prevent doomsday. From what I gathered, neither our governments nor we citizens appear to be in the mood for implementing his recommendations.

CAD At the Nano Level

The third presentation interested me a lot. Mark Sims is with Nanorex, a company that has developed the first CAD system for nanotechnology. The CAD system is called NanoEngineer 1 and looks a lot like any parametric solid modeler, except that it uses atoms and molecules for building blocks. (It even has a model view and a feature tree, except that it is called a "model tree" here.) In short, nanotechnology involves creation of custom molecules and fiddling around with them in order to create things that I haven’t quite understood yet.



NanoEngineer 1 lets users create 3D virtual molecules and string them together to form complex compounds. The output of the modeling process is a plain text file containing a bunch of numbers and codes which can be sent to companies that build these compounds and ship them to you by mail. Reminds me of rapid prototyping.



NanoEngineer 1 is the result of four years of development, and is due to be launched on April 24, And guess what? Nanorex is releasing this as open source! It has an API which can be used by programmers like me to make plug-ins. However, I am going to stick to developing plug-ins for normal CAD systems for now, for the very simple reason that I can understand them. I am not yet comfortable with poking around molecules.

I had heard a lot about nanotechnology, but never got to understanding it. Mark Sims' presentation explained a lot of what's going on in the field of nanotechnology research and implementation. I must admit that most of the core fundamental stuff went over my head, but at the same time, seemed to be quite interesting. Maybe I will read up on nanotechnology soon.

The Future of Engineering

The fourth presentation regarding “The Future of Engineering” was given by Peter Marks of Design Insight. He described how and why the USA had a period of excellence in the 1900s. Their innovation and engineering supremacy over the rest of the world made it a superpower and led to a strong economy. Then he shredded each and every factor that worked for the US in the 1900s, and showed how these factors are now obsolete or no longer work for the USA anymore. Basically he set the stage for the US to be royally screwed in the 2000s. Although his views were quite pessimistic, I must admit that they closely resembled the reality that we see today.

He touched on many factors, one of which was outsourcing. In my opinion, outsourcing is not a solution for the USA, but rather a problem. The USA is no longer outsourcing only manufacturing and services; it is also outsourcing knowledge activities, like research and development -- things that are going to come back to haunt them in the future. When you end up making other people smarter than yourself, you are going to end up finding yourself in a compromising position.

After the presentations, there was an informal poolside gathering, and later spouses were called to join with the eating and drinking. In my case, my spouse is sitting pretty on the other side of the planet.

Friday is when the real action starts.

(Deelip Menezes is the owner of SYCODE, a programming firm specializing in CAD translators, located in Panaji, Goa, India. His Weblog at http://www.deelip.com carries additional reporting on COFES.)

Comments

[Matt]

Interestingly, from what I can see in the images, your NanoEngineer looks suspiciously like SolidWorks. The confirmation corner in the upper right of the graphics window, the triad in the lower left, the headings in the property mgr to the left, the look of the command mgr, even the default background fade. The rulers are different, and some of the colored icons look different. The pictures aren't that detailed, but it looks like SolidWorks to me.

Maybe they will just offer the portion of the code that sits on top of SW as the "open source", since I doubt SW is going to make any code public.

[Deelip Menezes]

See www.nanorex.com

[Tihamer Toth-Fejel]

If you want to read up on nanotechnology (as opposed to colloidal chemistry), in addition to Nanorex's web site, there is Foresight's at http://www.foresight.org/ and Zyvex's at http://www.zyvex.com/. The best introductory book is Nanofuture by J. Storrs Hall.

[Jason]

Is it SolidWorks? The screenshot at that site looks very much like it with some icon changes.

Also, one of the job openings says:
"SolidWorks knowledge a huge plus"

[Tihamer Toth-Fejel]

Nanoengineer does *not* run on top of SolidWorks. It is written in Python.

[PeteM]

I just wanted to add a note to the "quite pessimistic" assessment of my COFES talk. The first part of the talk was most definately intended as a wake-up call on all sixteen of the "ingredients" for our "secret sauce" of innovation. However, the last part of the presention went point by point -- all 16 factors -- into what can be done to regain a competitive edge. I'd hope that the take away was more of a kick in the pants, than a funk about the now-past good old days.