CDFAM Computational Design Symposium

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Tokyo 2026 David Burpee · MorphXgen Many Additive footwear platforms promise a level of customization beyond traditional footwear manufacturing processes, but how custom is it really? This presentation will explore a variety of strategies for the integration of various custom data into bespoke additive-ready algorithms in footwear design. The ability to creat...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Tokyo 2026 Sarat Babu · SARAT Computational design approaches to optimization are often constrained by the tools available and the established methods for generating optimal forms. With AI coding tools, the barrier for designers to develop their own software and pipelines has dropped considerably. Sub-Optimal reframes optimization around two priorities: prese...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Tokyo 2026 This episode is the opening keynote from CDFAM Tokyo 2026, presented by Guido Cossu and Ivo Timóteo of Braid . Braid was founded in Tokyo in 2020 by a team drawn from physics, applied mathematics, computational geometry, large-scale simulation and machine learning. At the time, the prevailing view in AI held that scaling end-to-end learning on ever...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — DC 2026 Giorgia Cannici · Virginia Tech What if material fabrication could shift from assembly to growth—and be directed with precision through external fields? This work introduces magnetotropic plants: genetically engineered organisms in which gravity-sensing organelles (statoliths) are rendered magnetically responsive. By replacing gravitational cues with...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — DC 2026 Matthew Shomper · Not a Robot Engineering Nature has been solving the problem of impact protection for millennia, in order to arrive at solutions far more elegant than anything on the market today. The microstructure of a bighorn sheep’s horn is one of the most striking examples : a geometry that is brutally efficient at scattering and absorbing energ...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — DC 2026 Damola Michael; Elliot Glassman · CannonDesign The environmental design conversation typically begins too late, after massing is committed and geometry is locked. Aurora repositions that conversation to day one, giving architects and engineers an immediate, evidence-based picture of any site before a design tool is opened. The platform synthesises EPW...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — DC 2026 Matthew Sederberg · Coreform The traditional “design-to-analysis” loop is often bottlenecked by the laborious process of mesh generation, which can consume up to 80% of total simulation time. This presentation introduces Coreform IGA for Abaqus, a solution that brings CAD-exact isogeometric analysis (IGA) directly into the Abaqus ecosystem. By utilizi...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — DC 2026 Mike Park · Flexcompute Computational design enables wider configuration exploration and reduces time to market, but turning innovation into validated, manufacturable designs is hampered by human-in-the-loop simulation. Manual geometry cleanup, meshing, and data management pace every workflow, while the feedback loops between simulation and the rest o...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — DC 2026 Andreas Vlahinos · Advanced Engineering Solutions PCMs provide cooling without requiring an extra power source, unlike fans or active liquid cooling systems. They absorb peak energy loads during operation and release that heat when the ambient temperature drops, acting as a buffer against rapid temperature changes. This allows for more compact thermal...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — DC 2026 Steve Massey · SysGit Software development was transformed when version control became infrastructure rather than afterthought. Hardware engineering has not had an equivalent transition. Requirements live in documents. System models are stored in vendor-locked platforms. Design reviews happen in meetings rather than pull requests. The result is progra...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Michael Frei · ARENA Physica Most advances in computational design focus on mechanical structure — domains we can visualize and have evolved an intuition for. But as modern hardware becomes increasingly software defined, the unseen and unintuitive world of electromagnetism is taking center stage. Conventional solvers can simulate fields, ye...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Sai Nelaturi · C-Infinity The gap between digital design and physical assembly is not primarily a geometry problem. It is a reasoning problem. Engineering teams spend thousands of hours communicating assembly intent through manual CAD workflows, managing configuration complexity across product variants, and catching fitment and feasibility...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Juan Alonso · Luminary The next decade of great-power competition will be won or lost in the engineering loop. Adversaries have increased the speed of iteration in hypersonics, undersea platforms, and autonomous aircraft and the U.S. defense industrial base cannot keep up by relying on traditional engineering workflows. Closing that gap req...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Alexander Htet Kyaw · MIT Recent advances in 3D generative AI make it possible to create object geometries directly from natural language, but turning these digital forms into functional physical objects remains a major challenge. Most generated 3D models are meshes that do not contain the component level, structural, material, and assembly...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Brandon DeMille · General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Computational design methodologies, including topology optimization, are transforming airframe structures development by enabling rapid exploration of design configurations during early conceptual phases. This presentation demonstrates a workflow that enables informed decision-making ac...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Chris Helmerich · Celedon Solutions Most ‘AI for engineering’ tools today sit beside the design process with a chat window next to a CAD viewer, a copilot that summarizes documents someone still has to act on. The harder problem is putting AI inside the loop, where it can read and write the same structured representation of the system that...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Jan Vandenbrande · nTop Current Computer Aided Design systems excel in static detailed design but are too fragile and slow to support Design Exploration and Multidisciplinary Design Optimization for conceptual and preliminary design. This talk introduces a new approach to modeling products that overcomes these shortcomings based on implicit...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 William Steadman · Quanscient We present the results of the largest CFD simulations to date deployed on IBM and IonQ quantum hardware through our ongoing collaborations across the aerospace, maritime, and automotive sectors. We will explore the critical trade-offs quantum computing introduces to computational design in aerodynamics and aero...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Austin Herrema · Istari Digital As the Department of Defense accelerates adoption of digital engineering and advanced manufacturing, the challenge is no longer defining the digital thread—it is executing it across a fragmented Defense Industrial Base (DIB). This session will explore a consortium-based approach to demonstrating an end-to-end...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Rhushik Matroja · Cognitive Design Systems Artificial intelligence is poised to automate a large share of design engineering work, yet the technology that excites the commercial world poses a fundamental problem for high-consequence industries. Generative AI is probabilistic by nature. It produces plausible answers, not provably correct one...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Daniel Hambleton · Metafold Generative AI is rapidly expanding what designers and engineers can create in 3D, but visual plausibility is not the same as geometric fidelity. This presentation asks a practical validation question: how close are AI-generated CAD models really to a target desired shape? We introduce a feature-vector workflow us...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 TJ Root · InfinitForm The gap between optimized geometry and manufacturable components has been the defining constraint of computational design for three decades. Topology optimization produces brilliant forms that machinists cannot cut. Those forms are not editable in CAD / or CAD friendly. Simulation validates performance that mainstream...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Sergey Pigach · CORE studio | Thornton Tomasetti CORE studio spent a decade building machine learning tools for structural design and analysis, all running as cloud services behind APIs. When MCP arrived, handing those same tools to an agent turned out to be close to trivial. Sergey Pigach demonstrates Bender, an agentic system running on A...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Rik Baruah · Intact Solutions AI is reshaping engineering as it drives demand for surrogate models, large design studies, and agentic workflows that require automated simulation loops at scale. These pipelines collide with two realities: geometric representation is fragmented throughout the hardware lifecycle (from CAD to point clouds), and...

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Washington DC 2026 Andrew Acuff · 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 coordinat...