Key takeaways from attending ALTAIR's Digital Design Conference Keynotes

I was lucky enough to attend the morning session of 2017 Altair Digital Design Conference held at the British Motor Museum last week. Here are some takeaways from the keynote session which was very informative and pertinent.

Two speakers who were last minute changes impressed me the most. One was my colleague, Andy Searle, who heads the enterprise architecture for virtual engineering at Jaguar Land Rover and the other was, David Moseley, director of power-train engineering at Lucid Motors.

Andy is someone who is always willing to help and share knowledge. I do not remember a single conversation with him that did not start with, "how can I help your team", and ended with, you guessed it right, "please let me know if we can help in any way". He fires up those positive neurons in your brain which makes you ask the next person you see, "How can I help you?". His presentation was an eye opener on the progress and improvement IT architecture has made over the last 5 years. It also show-cased the importance of, and perhaps little under-appreciated, the role his team plays to run the simulations smoothly. When he presented the state-of-the-art virtual engineering tools and the role simulation plays in developing our products, three of four simulation test-cases were the ones developed by my team. This would have been impossible to imagine 5 years ago for some. It is also a testimony to the fact that if you have a great team disciplined to act on the lead measures, lag measures will follow. Thanks Andy - for always being ready to help the team.

David's presentation was a great example of authentic performance in a manufactured environment. A three-act story told so well. He started off with "form and function stagnation" of automotive industry during the 20th century. The second act was about evolution of vehicles to executive jet like experience via technology and power-density convergence. And then he used his slides as a visual aid to explain his third act - the role simulation can play in design-space exploration and how Lucid Motors is making the best use of it to optimise the vehicle before validation. He was also very modest about Lucid Air. And particularly autonomous driving. I have seen many people trying to sell this as a "done deal" whereas the reality is anything but. Interestingly enough there was some technology glitch during the previous keynote and it continued during David's presentation as well. I also have seen many other speakers getting upset and jeopardising their presentation. David handled it the best way I have seen yet and in fact used it to his advantage. He got the audience hooked and kept their attention.

Over the years I've developed a habit of making sketch notes of presentations and workshops I attend. I start it for every one of them however not necessarily finish it for all. Some presenters are obviously better at holding your attention and explaining their point very well, as if to a 5 year old.

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