Cloud Computing is the First Approved Project for the Russian Silicon Valley

For those who don’t know about the Russian Big Project aimed at driving national modernization and innovation processes, I quote some introductory lines from “Russia has a wealth of engineering talent, but needs to put a lot more in place” by David Talbot:

Russia is finalizing plans to launch a Silicon Valley-like "innovation center" near Moscow. The Kremlin has selected a patch of farmland near a private business school, has set aside funding, and this week named a Nobel laureate, the physicist Zhores Alferov, as the project's science advisor. Now comes the hard part: making it work.

Yesterday, a Russian business oriented daily Vedomosti announced that according to A.Dvorkovitch, a Russian Presidential aide on economy and the secretary of Commission on Modernization, the first project already selected for Skolkovo (native name of location of the future innovation center) is a project of a Russian investment fund Almaz Capital to create business incubators in the field of cloud programming. It is alleged that besides cloud computing, the same project, under the same funding will develop computer speech recognition and technology transfer of 3D-images through the Internet.

Speech Recognition and efficient 3D images transfer are obviously respectable and fundamental projects, so combining them into one package with a symbolic funding of about 30-35 million dollars, in my opinion, seems strange, to put it mildly. Most likely, two additional projects are included to make the application more clear for decision makers: in these situations, in Soviet times, when unable to estimate the fundamental scientific and technological significance of proposals, such decision makers severely asked: “What does it give to our national economy?”. By the way, as the article quotes, "half (of those $30-35 M), will hopefully be given by the government "...

One of the experts mentioned in the article noted that major Western companies (e.g. IBM or HP) have already invested billions of dollars - likely without close correlation with computer speech recognition. Another expert believes it would be more reasonable to use existing Western results and adapt them to the Skolkovo project under the requirements of Russian consumers, in particular taking open-source software as the basis.

Finally I want to remind of my earlier post Clouds in Russia and give a link to the web site of the first Cloud Computing Congress - the first international event on this topic in Russia which will be held in a week in Moscow with a strategic partnership of Microsoft. In September COFES-Russia, in one of its working groups, will discuss cloud computing in CAD/PLM.

Source: Vedomosti article

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Dassault Systèmes Chooses Restaurant "Pushkin" to Explain What is Life-like Experience

PR agency Fleishman-Hillard Vanguard on behalf of Dassault Systemes Russia invited isicad.ru/net to attend a media breakfast in one of the best Moscow restaurants "Pushkin". The invitation announced that Laurent Couillard, VP Sales EMEA at Dassault Systèmes, will tell about V6, in particular:

• V6 PLM Express for SMB

• Communities and life-like experience with V6

• Success stories

• Alliance of Dassault Systèmes and IBM.

Seems I can be proud to get this invitation since it was likely sent to 5 top CAD/PLM-related Russian language media: among them isicad is the only without-paper edition. The problem is that isicad is based in Novosibirsk, 4 hours by plane from Moscow... That's why I asked my close partner from Moscow - Dmitry Movchan, the director and founder of a publishing house DMK-press, specialized in IT, including a lot of CAD/PLM books, in particular a series "CAD: From A to Z" supported by isicad. Thanks to Dmitry, isicad readers can now take a look at the pictures below and get a flavour of the meeting, restaurant, participants, and perhaps V6:).

Note that I am completely responsible for the comments...

At the picture above, Mr.Laurent Couillard and his intepreter are making reconnaissance.

At last, all is ready and Mr.Couillard can start.

What happened then (16 more photoes), can be found here .

One More Section at COFES-Russia, Now on AEC/BIM

After a preliminary program of COFES-Russia was announced, some people and companies reproached the organizers for the Seminar's focus on (M)CAD and lack of AEC/BIM. There is a dozen of obviously important actors in the Russian market that consider AEC or AEC+BIM as an important if not the key part of their business.

Therefore we added one more Working Group (WG-7) which is characterized as follows.

Perspectives of Building Information Modeling and its impact on AEC market

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a process of generation and management of building/construction data during its lifecycle. BIM uses AEC CAD tools for creating common information model of a building/construction that is shared for collaborative development by several teams of architects and engineers. The building information model consists of the description of geometry, spatial relations, geographic data, material properties, etc. Participants of this workgroup will discuss new tools and technologies for creating and managing BIM data.

Topics:
- Parametric building modeling
- 4D technology
- Green design
- Computer-aided engineering for AEC
- Collaborative development
- AEC design data standards
- Employment of new technologies in the Russian AEC market
- PLM and BIM: twins?

The latest version of the agenda can be found here.

I will appreciate any proposals to improve a summary of the domain and the list of potential topics for discussion.
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Autodesk Forum-2010 in Moscow: How Many New Gimmicks?

Recent news on Twitter Autodesk_CIS: “We are pleased to announce that this year the Autodesk Forum will take place on September 22-23 in Moscow. Make sure you mark these dates in your diary:)”. As the editor of isicad.ru/isicad.net, I sought further details from Anastasia Morozova, Field Marketing Area Team Manager, Autodesk Russia and CIS.

Аnastasia Мorozova: Yes, now we can confirm that the Autodesk Forum will be on September 22-23 in Moscow. For the first time it is planned to continue for two days. All previous Forums were good but every time us, as the organizers, and participants suffered because one day was only enough to get a cursory view of the problems. The two-day format should help us to make this event interesting and above all practically useful for all our traditional clients – representatives of manufacturers and architecture-and-construction industry. This year for the first time we will have special sections for animators and graphic designers.

Typically Autodesk Forums have all kinds of cool surprises like giving a lift to the attendees by Hummers … … Probably two days will accommodate twice as many cool things as usual?

Certainly, the objective of our Forum is very clear – to deliver useful information and sensations that our clients don’t get in their daily working routine. With Internet popularity it is becoming a more and more difficult task but we are also getting smarter and more inventive.

This year we have a who-o-ole bunch of interesting ideas which we are now working on. From demonstrating hardware technologies and various equipment that they write a lot about but not everybody has had a possibility to see it with one’s own eyes, ask questions to the experts and see if it fits their company, to completely crazy ideas about demonstrating new computer games developed in Autodesk products. I think that for many of our clients it will be interesting to see how someone uses the products, which they employ to visualize their projects, for development of the most popular FPS or air-simulators. And if combined with powerful stereo-effects and state-of-the-art equipment... Actually, it’s better to see this for oneself.

Two full days… You don’t mean that everything will come down to specifics and bigger entertainment? Or you will engage some new formats after all?

New formats definitely will be present. First of all, two days finally give us an opportunity to include many presentations by our clients into the program. Typically, demonstrating already proven user experience is a much expected part of the event. Also, apart from the primary flow of presentations in the main auditorium, we are organizing several additional flows with presentations focused on implementation technology, lessons learnt and product uses, new software – those products that are at the stage of development... There definitely will be a session for programmers – who develop applications for our products. Obviously we plan a series of presentations for educations institutions. Many presentations will be given by our authorized partners. So participants will not only be able to get valuable information but also select a future supplier on the basis of the level of competence shown by the specialists of a particular partner. Certainly there will be special presentations by our partner - HP. This year NVIDIA also has become a Forum partner.

As you understand the Program is not finalized yet. More details can be found in July on our web site.

See full version at isicad.net

LEDAS Responds to D-Cubed / Siemens PLM Software

For obvious reasons, I reproduce a guest editorial (by Dmitry Ushakov, director of product management at LEDAS, Novosibirsk Russia) just published by Ralph Grabowski in his u p F r o n t . e Z i n e, Issue #646. The only additional remark is that the technologies in question will be openly and in details discussed within one of the working groups in September at COFES-Russia seminar in Moscow.

"All About D-Cubed's 2D DCM" (in #645) was especially interesting, since the name of the company I work for (LEDAS) was mentioned. In answering upFront.eZine's question about competitors, D-Cubed's Dr Howarth said that "For the DCM geometric constraint solving components, LEDAS, based in Russia, is a relatively recent entrant". May I make a correction?

LEDAS Ltd. was established eleven years ago -- in 1999. Seven years ago, we began selling our technology component LGS 2D, a direct competitor of D-Cubed's 2D DCM. Our component is designed to support parametric sketching/drawing in 2D/3D CAD/CAM/CAE applications. Since then, a dozen software companies have licensed LGS 2D, as well as our 3D version, LGS 3D (our component that is a competitor of D-Cube's 3D DCM), and embedded them successfully into their applications. So, while we are ten years younger than D-Cubed, we are not new.

From our point of view, the primary difference between us is that D-Cubed is a part of a big vendor, Siemens PLM Systems; we are independent. Siemens PLM Systems competes in the CAD/CAM applications market against other companies who license D-Cubed's components. Do these companies receive the same level of technical support and functionality as do divisions inside Siemens? For example, are any competitors able to license Siemens' synchronous technology? This is not a question that our customers need to ask, for all of our technologies are completely available to them, because we do not compete with our customers.

We are aware of Dr. Owen (founder of D-Cubed) and his remarkable contribution to the field of geometric constraint solving. At the same time, it is worthwhile mentioning the contributions of other researchers. Among them are Prof. Hoffmann from Purdue University (USA), Prof. Michelucci from Université de Bourgogne (France), and Prof. Clement from Dassault Systemes (France), as well as other pioneer researchers whose work on solving geometric constraints go as far back as 1975.

Constraints Solved to the Users' Satisfaction
Whereas algorithmic issues have been elaborated enough during the last thirty years, there are just a few commercial geometric constraint solvers on the market. In my opinion, it is not enough to only solve the constraint satisfaction problem. What is also needed is a way to find a solution that best corresponds to the expectations of end-users -- this is called natural behavior, and sometimes depends on the subjective opinions of users. The maturity of a particular commercial technology for constraint solving is based on continuous improvement in the quality of its solving procedure. This process is driven by requests from customers who use the solver in different contexts.

LEDAS also does research in constraint solving. It seems that our team is somewhat similar in its scientific and technical background to the one Dr Howarth works with; in particular, about half of our developers have their Ph.D.s and many others have a good chance to receiving it. This brain power is necessary, because the development of CAD components combines strong mathematical, computer science, and software engineering know-how. We actively collaborate with universities, such as the ongoing research at Purdue University (USA) in the field of CAD user interfaces. Together, we are improving constraint-driven freehand sketching, which is the key to building robust sketch-aware systems and sketch-based interfaces for future CAD systems.

Some customers who license our technology are not only traditional CAD vendors (Tecnos G.A. and CD-adapco), but also firms who embed our LGS 3D component into custom CAD systems. Joe Gibbs Racing of NASCAR, for example, is using our software to assemble suspension parts onto the chassis. Other customers prefer to exploit our mathematically-skilled team to develop proprietary key components, such as for CATIA V5, which has been on the market now for several years.

Last year, we collaborated with Open Design Alliance, a non-profit consortium of over 2,000 software developers, to integrate our LGS 2D geometric constraint solver into their Teigha platform, and is fully compatible with the DWG 2010 file format. Now our solver is available to ODA members who require constraint support for their applications.

Constraint Technology for the Future
One of Dr. Howarth's interesting points is regarding the future direction for geometric constraint solvers. We share his vision of increasing the use of 3D solvers as the engine for a new generation of direct modelers. For us, this is an important field of research. As direct modelers become more popular, the question becomes how to keep design intent in a history-free environment. To answer the question, LEDAS is now developing our "variational direct modeling" (VDM) technology.

(VDM allows users to intelligently modify any parameter in a direct modeling system, while design intent is automatically recognized by our engine and expressed as a set of geometric and engineering constraints. We have developed a plug-in for McNeel & Associates' Rhinoceros direct modeling software, which allows anyone to evaluate our VDM technology.)

I trust that this addition to the Dr. Howarth interview is useful for readers of upFront.eZine, and I am available to answer further questions at ushakov@ledas.com."

[Dmitry Ushakov is director of product management at LEDAS, Novosibirsk Russia.]
http://www.ledas.com/

COFES-Russia Update and Deelip Menezes

Today, at the very end of my Siberian working day, I've published at isicad.net a new - rather detailed - agenda of the COFES-Russia Seminar which will be held this September in Moscow. Then some small time later, I decided to put in my blog a link to this agenda - to add it some promotion.

However before I made this link, I found out that Deelip Menezes has already published his post about my new agenda. Deelip is a real professional!

Well, I decided it would be better if, instead of going directly to isicad.net, you go there via this Deelip's post and his comments.

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COFES-Russia and isicad-2010: Program Update

NB: if you came to this post after May 4, please go to COFES-Russia program update published at isicad.net where some new editing has been made.

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COFES-Russia seminar organized by Cyon Research and LEDAS will be held in Moscow on September, 21. The seminar is organized in the framework of the 4th International Forum isicad powered by LEDAS. See some related references below.

A week ago, the event’s program was refined and included – somewhat in traditions of COFES – a number of working groups (WG). Organizing committee in coordination with Brad Holtz has specified six WGs. There will be two rounds (in total – 3 hours) each round includes three WGs that will be working in parallel during 1.5 hours. After these rounds are over, there will be a joint integrating round table + press-conference.

Following 6 working groups are planned.

1. Direct Modeling as a Basis of Future Intelligent CAD
Creation and editing engineering data
- Comparative analysis of history-based parametric modeling with direct geometry editing: advantages and drawbacks of each approach
- Presentation of direct editing tools in popular CAD packages
- How to keep design intent in history-free environment
- What will be the CAD exchange format after 50 years

2. News & trends in PLM/PDM
Engineering data management:
- Key tasks of PLM in the next decade
- Digital Prototyping vs. Full-Scale PLM
- Open-source PLM/PDM
- Integrated PLM-ERP-MES Systems
- Cloudy PLM

3. Marketing and Advertizing in the Era of Global Social Networks
New ways of engineering software marketing:
- Rich 3D Media vs. paper media
- Social Networks and Communities
- Inbound Marketing, Community Building,...

4. CAD-training for future engineers
- Early CAD education in the school
- Software Users or Engineers?
- More discoverable software
- On-line e-books and trainings
- The role of 3D Media in the education process
- The role of new hardware devices in the education: Google Set Top, iPad, ...

5. New business-models for engineering software
- Cloud computing and SaaS
- FOSS(Free and Open Source Software)CAD/CAM/CAE/PLM...

6. New hardware technologies for engineering software
- GPU usage in CAD/CAM/CAE
- 3D pointing devices and multi-touch.
- 3D printing
- Augmented reality

Everybody is kindly invited to give their comments and propose more hot topics.

Related references:
- Brief COFES-Russia English info
- Russian isicad-2010 web site
- Cyon Research announces COFES Russia Seminar in partnership with LEDAS
- COFES-Russia Seminar and Multi-vendor Forum isicad-2010 in Moscow
- HP and PTC support COFES-Russia Seminar in September 2010
- Join Deelip Menezes to attend COFES-Russia and isicad-2010 in Moscow
- Previous isicad Forums: 2004, 2006, and 2008
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