CDFAM Computational Design Symposium

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Ryan McClelland · NASA Goddard AI is transforming how we design and build space missions. At NASA, we’ve already shown that AI can take requirements and rapidly generate optimized structures that are lighter, stronger, and delivered in days instead of months. The Text-to-Spaceship vision scales this up through a secure, cloud-deployed ecosy...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Brian Ringley · Boston Dynamics Atlas is a general-purpose humanoid aimed squarely at industrial work, and Brian Ringley makes the case that its value is economic rather than technological. Most of the automation gaps on a factory floor could be closed with conventional equipment; what makes that impractical is designing a bespoke solution...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Luis Salazar Betancourt · Tech Soft 3D Advances in computational design and additive manufacturing have enabled increasingly complex geometry, but industrial AI adoption remains constrained by a fundamental challenge: relating CAD design data to manufacturing behavior and downstream business processes. Geometry, process data, and enterprise inf...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Maria Claudia Valverde Rojas · University of Stuttgart, IntCDC This presentation introduces a design and research framework that integrates geometry generation with real-world climatic and ecological data to support more-than-human thermal comfort in the exterior of building envelopes. Over the past two years, I have developed architected porou...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Nikolas Borrel Jensen, Oliver Littlewood · Pasteur Labs Real multiphysics necessitates coordination along multiple dimensions: one is of course the mixed physics, another is the heterogeneous data types & modeling approaches, and a third is the multidisciplinary (mis)communication. AI shoved into engineering workflows does not eliminate these g...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Wasil Rezk · BeyondMath A new generation of AI models is emerging — not just faster approximators, but intelligent systems that understand and generate physics. This talk explores how foundational physics AI breaks from the surrogate modeling paradigm. Unlike models that rely on customer-provided simulation data or narrow datasets, BeyondMath’s...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Shahroz Khan · Compute Maritime Water transport, which accounts for approximately 90% of global trade, is essential to economic growth but poses a significant environmental challenge. In 2020, shipping emitted 1.4 billion tonnes of CO₂, nearly 3% of global emissions. Without decisive action, this figure could rise to 18% by 2050. To address thi...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Max Gaedtke, Markus Lempke · nTop, Siemens Energy Turbine blade thermal management demands tight coupling between design exploration and high-fidelity simulation—yet traditional workflows separate these domains, limiting the design space that can be practically explored. We present an integrated parametric optimization framework enabled by nTop...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Thomas Rees · ToffeeX Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence have enormous potential as tools for generative design in engineering. However, most industry efforts remain stuck in research prototypes, brittle bespoke models, or disconnected add-ons that rarely survive real engineering workflows. In this talk, we will present an engineer’s...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Wesley Essink · Siemens Digital Industries Software Engineering design is increasingly shaped by diverse sources of data (e.g. scans, images, measurements, simulation, requirements, reference geometries etc.). Traditional geometry modeling approaches often struggle to integrate these datasets in a flexible and scalable way. Implicit modeling of...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Rhushik Matroja · Cognitive Design Systems Mechanical engineering has been limited by the capabilities of traditional CAD software, most of which are built on architectures that are more than 30 years old. How can we design the products of the next 30 years using technology created three decades ago? AI can introduce a real paradigm shift in ho...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Jon Wilde · Simscale Simulation is central to engineering decision-making, yet in many organizations it remains an expert-driven activity rather than a scalable capability embedded across new product introduction (NPI). As product complexity grows and timelines compress, the key challenge shifts from solver accuracy to workflow coordination: wh...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Moritz Rietschel · Raven Twenty years of community-built Grasshopper infrastructure, decades of firm knowledge, scattered documentation, and forum posts that solved your problem in 2011. The problem has never been capability - it has been access. Raven is a code agent for Grasshopper that works across 900+ plugins through the native API. Rather...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Anne Pasman, Emmy Kerssen · Saxion Hogeschool CPAP therapy is used to treat patients with sleep apnea by providing constant air pressure through a mask during sleep. For many patients (75,4%), standard masks fit poorly or require tight adjustment, causing issues such as pressure points or leakage resulting in dry eyes, skin irritation, and fina...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Michele Pescatore, Carol Fanjul · AiA Life Designers Michele Pescatore and Carol Fanjul of AiA Life Designers present a simulation-driven workflow that brings environmental analysis into the earliest stages of architectural design, where decisions have the greatest influence on a project's environmental performance but actionable feedback is us...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Verena Vogler · McNeel Europe Verena Vogler introduces Rhino. Ecologic, an ecological simulation framework for Rhino and Grasshopper built for landscape architects and urban planners working in computational design. The plugin integrates ecological simulation into existing 3D modeling workflows to support nature-inclusive strategies at large an...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Mary Baker · Palace 3D Computational geometry has advanced considerably. Color and texture in additive design have not kept pace. As multi-material hardware and capable file formats become more accessible, programming color and texture directly into the design workflow is emerging as a meaningful new capability. Mary Baker draws on her experien...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Oluwaseyi Sosanya · Gravity Sketch Spatial computing is regularly framed as a future breakthrough. In certain workflows, it is already delivering measurable value. Oluwaseyi Sosanya examines where immersive technologies are making a tangible impact in product development today, with particular attention to cable harnessing and automotive clay m...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Rebeka Melber · Istari Digital AI coding tools didn't just accelerate software development — they changed who gets to build. A comparable shift is underway in hardware. Rebeka Melber examines how AI paired with connected engineering infrastructure is lowering the barrier to hardware innovation. The argument isn't that AI replaces deep expertise...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Javier Blanco Cordero · Quix Engineering teams have found AI useful for discrete tasks: SQL queries, graphs, summaries. Higher-value work, root cause analysis, physics-based ML, production deployment, remains out of reach. The standard diagnosis is that the models need to improve. Javier Blanco Cordero's experience points the other way: the mod...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026 Quercus Hernández · Emmi AI Engineering is entering a new paradigm where AI is no longer limited to accelerating isolated simulations, but is becoming a foundational layer of the industrial design and manufacturing stack. Across sectors such as automotive, energy, semiconductors, and aerospace, engineering workflows remain constrained by slow s...

Beyond Parametric: Explorable Simulation for Real Design Iterations Presentation Abstract Design space exploration promises engineers the ability to evaluate thousands of variants in hours. The prerequisite—rarely discussed—is building a parametric geometry model that won’t break. This front-loaded investment assumes you know your design space before exploring it. Real engineering iteration isn’t...

Deterministic engineering analysis assigns fixed values to loading conditions, geometry, and material properties. The approach is tractable, but it forces a choice between conservative overdesign and exposure to failure modes that fall outside assumed limits. Neither outcome is satisfying. Greg Grigoriadis of Metisec describes a design toolkit that replaces fixed inputs with statistical distributi...

Body-in-White development sits at the intersection of structural performance, manufacturability, and schedule pressure — and traditional workflows are increasingly strained by the pace of platform proliferation and regulatory demands. This episode examines how SEAT/CUPRA is modernizing BIW development through Synera’s Multi-Agent System (MAS), connecting CAD, CAE, and manufacturing processes withi...

The gap between geometric modeling and structural simulation has always been a workflow problem as much as a technical one. Every time a designer changes a shape, the mesh breaks, boundary conditions need redefining, and the simulation has to be rerun from scratch. At the scale of iterative or generative design workflows, that overhead compounds quickly. In this episode recorded at CDFAM Barcelona...