RealizeLive 2024 Summary

In the last year, I’ve done less to contribute to the engineering technology world than any year in a long time. Few blog posts. Fewer published articles. Even fewer crazy public rants on … anything. I haven’t participated in the Solid Edge Community or even the CADForum.net site as much as previous years. I did some things behind the screen that a lot of people will never see. I just feel in general that I deserved less to be a guest of Siemens at RealizeLive2004 this year.

One of the main people I talk to now and then said “you’re the closest thing we have to a celebrity” where by “we” I think it was meant Solid Edge. If this has been a slow year for me, it’s got to have been even slower for someone who will say something like that out loud and willingly.

Community

Siemens did, however, recognize a bunch of people who did deserve to be there due to their great contributions to the online Siemens community, and are recognized as Community Catalysts. My blurry picture doesn’t really do it justice, but here are the names:

Alexander Diig, Arkadiusz Kulesza, Blas Molero Hidalgo, David Stuckman, Francesco Arfillli, Harri Joy, Bruce Shand, Imre Szucs, Graham Inchley, Jamie Griffis, Jan Bos, Ken Grundey, Matt Martin, Alessandro Frattini, Chad Billings, Randy Ellsworth, Satyenjit Bagal, Sean John Andrew Cresswell, Steffen Bangsow, Tushar Suradkar, Bogdan Filipov.

Many of these names belong to people who were active when I was working at Siemens and before. I hung out with a few of them at this conference too. Congratulations to all these people, and many thanks from the community to which you all have dedicated a lot of time, effort and expertise. Special personal thanks to Pella employee Ken Grundey and Siemens employee Kevin Moran who saved me from technical quandries more than a couple times. I like to do research, and some times get myself in over my head.

Keynotes

The best keynotes this year were Tony Hemmelgarn’s opening talk where he really laid out the vision for end-to-end digitalization, digital thread and some of the other buzzwords that get thrown around. Also the lady from the Navy gave an interesting talk, even though I’m not quite sure that I followed her through the twisties of government speak and 3 and 4 letter acronyms. She make a cogent case for digital twin improving the Navy’s success with various levels of BOMs, maintenance and configuration management.

Sustainability

There were two areas of focus in the general sessions that I’d like to comment on. Sustainability is always a theme, and it was again this year. I think I had something critical to say last year, and I’ll at least be consistent this year. Every time you get up to speak about sustainability, you’ve got a choice: Either say something that makes people see it from a new point of view or spew the same old quasi-religious diatribe. This year seemed like another missed opportunity.

There was a second sustainability presentation from Norwegian battery manufacturer Freyr. He could have talked about real battery or more generally energy storage innovation to get away from the current problematic recipe for Lithium Ion. Instead it was a rousing harder faster speech that made it sound like the future of batteries is just more of them and faster. Again, another huge missed opportunity. There are so many developments in batteries and energy storage that I’m sure a new like Freyr isn’t just working hard to figure out how to manufacture the same old technology faster. I would have liked to hear about other ideas under development.

Plus, I’d like to give an honorable mention to the host on the main stage, Magnus Edholm. He presented the crowd with choices of future technology and the crowd did a visual vote. Choices like where does your future power come from, a fusion plant or energy storage? How do you get your Starbucks delivered, by robot or by drone? I just thought it was an interesting way to get the crowd to think about what’s coming. I was very glad to hear mention of fusion. Every year that goes by we get closer to this technological revolution which will electrify everything much quicker and more effectively than government mandates and legislation.

My problem with the approach of the first two presentations was that people are so busy trying to defensively justify their own actions, they aren’t really bothering to make a rational argument to win people over. This is why this topic has become political, and even religious. I agree with the goals of sustainability, but I think the mindset of how to achieve it (by brow-beating and shaming people) is counter productive. Also, while energy storage is a necessary development, the uncontrolled dumping of chemicals (spent batteries which in actual practice are not recycled at a high rate) is not. There are many solutions to these problems, but I fear that vested interests are slowing adoption of better ideas in a lot of different directions (much like in the fossil fuel world).

AI

The big topic for this year was of course AI. I’m always reluctant to comment on AI because I’m afraid I’m missing something about it. It turns out that I wasn’t missing much. There is FAR more speculation than facts in circulation on this topic. That’s not a bad thing, but we might do a better job of differentiating between the two. People who type for a living value looking prescient above all else, but almost everything you say that isn’t looking backwards is just a shot in the dark at this point.

But looking at the current situation, there are some things we can say about AI with some certainty. Computers have learned how to speak human. Your texting practices along with volumes of existing written word (which more than likely include copyrighted works) have been collected for years and have been the main contributor for these “large language models” to be able to identify ideas and predict what word will come next. This grows into the ability of computers to write coherent sentences and string them together into longer works. And as part of that, they can learn to speak like an engineer. At first, it seems this can be used as a “natural language” interface between engineers and tools or data analysis. AI is also good at finding patterns, relationships or correlations in large data sets. This is how it excels in medicine.

One of our own from the engineering technology world, Brad Holtz, researcher and analyst with Cyon Research and the defunct COFES conference became cofounder of Pattern Computer in 2016, which was intended to use AI to search for patterns in medical data to find cures and effective medicines for various medical conditions.

In an interview almost 7 years ago I asked John McEleney what role he thought AI would play in engineering software in the future. He declined to give a substantive answer. It could have been that he was working on something or didn’t have a good answer at the time. You can’t really blame him for that. We’re little further along now, and I still get the feeling that no one really knows where this is going. Everyone seems to be frantically trying to figure out what it can do, what it should do, and where to go next. Language turns out to have been the easy part of it.

Solid Edge has what it calls an AI command predictor, but it hasn’t been very successful for me. I think when I was doing a lot of modeling it worked better, but when I’m tinkering, doing random things, it doesn’t react well to that. I’m going to guess that a portion of AI’s future is going to be in straight up marketing. Automated or semi-automated processes may be relabeled as AI just to appear to be hip and down with the future. I think that sort of practice is going to cloud the water significantly as to what actually is AI – is it just programming? Where does it fall across the line into actual machine learning?

Solid Edge people seemed to be looking for good ideas for applying AI to engineering and design tasks, so I think what’s going to happen with this is still very much up in the air. Based on what AI is already doing , they would need a lot of 3D data to train the AI on, and they probably already have that with what must be a huge accumulated stack of models.

I can see AI becoming like an extension of a product like Rule Stream. Unfortunately knowledge based engineering (aka configurators) haven’t been as popular as I had hoped, but AI could push this into new territory. The concept of Rule Stream could be expanded from the top level where it is now – creating same-but-different products – to a wider base of lower level tasks such as creating functional elements of products such as enclosures, hinges, switches, wheels, common machine design components and that sort of thing. Engineers have to re-invent these things constantly. Think of injection molds. The same thing has to be re-engineered over and over. It’s very possible that AI could take over tasks like this from us.

Right now Rule Stream is kind of intensive in the programming area. It is conceivable that AI learns how to do the programming and interface to create specific tasks – such as a conveyor line between custom (human) designed manufacturing or packaging stations.

Techcxllence

There was a set of awards handed out. The awards were serious, and well-deserved. But the name was unfortunate. In Hemmelgarn’s opening keynote, he remarked that “we must have paid a consultant thousands of dollars” to come up with the product name for NX X. Well, that’s probably true. I’ll bet they paid a lot less for the Techcxllence award name. At least they should have. Six consonants in a row would even stretch the imagination of Siemens’ native German tongue.

What would you do with Technical Excellence / Xcelerator? Maybe Texellence (too Texan, maybe?) Maybe we can crowdsource for free a better award name and free us of this spelling and concatenation nightmare in future conferences. Hit me up in the comments.

Zel X

Zel X is a new Siemens product best described as a miniaturized PLM product meant to give small organizations tools to operate from CAD to CAM and a bit of file management and collaboration/communication/mark up – on a miniature level, for a miniature price. Runs in the cloud – you don’t have to install it or maintain a database. Runs on a browser, so you pick your hardware.

Why is this ok as cloud software and Solidworks cloud isn’t? Because Solidworks was conceived and sold as something else. Zel X is not trying to switch anyone, it’s just being up front about what it is, and you either buy it or don’t. I’m going to try it, so you may hear from me on this topic later.

Summary

Maybe I’m getting past the whole “CAD is the center of the universe”. Took a while.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.