If You Build It (Using Machine Learning) Will They Come? - Joe Barkai

Autodesk announced recently the availability of a shape-based search capability in A360. A blog article titled How Machine Learning Will Transform 3D Engineering describes the new capability, called Design Graph, as a "Google search-like functionality for the world of 3D models." Google search functionality is probably the wrong metaphor for 3D search. Web search is fundamentally text based, whereas searching for a part or a design requires a combination of textual and geometric terms and attributes, and sufficiently deep domain semantics. In fact, the blog article makes the very same argument later, describing Design Graph's purpose to "identify and understand designs based on their inherent characteristics--their shape and structure--rather than by any labeling (tags) or metadata" (i.e. Design Graph is not the first attempt to offer the engineering community a geometry-based search tool.