Announcing the Winners of the AU 2018 Speaker Awards

Many things make AU the incredible event it is, but certainly near the top of that list are the AU speakers themselves—the users, experts, innovators, and (yes) Autodeskers who share their knowledge, demonstrate new workflows, and move industry practice forward. Simply put, without our speakers, there would be no AU.

More than 850 speakers and co-speakers led sessions at AU 2018, each with unique insights and knowledge to offer, and attendees filled out nearly 13,000 class surveys over the course of the week. After accounting for factors like attendance and class format, we’re now ready to announce this year’s top-rated speakers. We’ve got one winner for every class format, one for first-time speaker, one for top Autodesk speaker, and the Speakers’ Choice Award for the speaker recognized by their fellow speakers.

Without further ado, put your hands together for the winners of the AU 2018 Speaker Awards:

Hands-on Lab

Marcello Sgambelluri of John A. Martin & Associates Structural Engineers
Getting Started with Customizing Dynamo for the Non-Programmers Using C#
Lab Assistants: John Pierson, Francis Sebastian, Carl Storms

Industry Talk or Panel

David Vickery of Industrial Light and Magic
ILM Blockbuster: Bringing the Dinosaurs of Jurassic World Back from Extinction

Roundtable

Desiree Mackey of Martin/Martin
Working with Multiple Generations

Instructional Demo

Deepak Maini of Cadgroup Australia
Advance Steel for BIM: Seamless Workflow from Design to Fabrication

First-Time Speaker

Dana De Filippi of SmithGroup
Automating Occupancy: A Smarter Way

Speakers’ Choice Award

Laurens Wijnschenk of 3DTechDraw
Mill Turn 2.0 with Autodesk HSM

Top Autodesk Speaker

Steven Dennis of Autodesk with co-speaker Raymond Xu
Ask the Inventor Developer

While these speakers took the top prizes, many others received high scores on their class surveys, and we’d like to recognize them as well:

Finally, we also want to take a moment to thank another important group: our speaker mentors. These are seasoned AU speakers (often past award winners themselves) who share their time, energy, and expertise to help new speakers create great learning experiences. From 1-on-1 meetings to online engagement, these folks are essential to the next generation of great AU speakers. Thanks to everyone who participated, and special thanks to Matt Murphy, J.C. Malitzke, and Michelle Rasmussen for leading the charge on the program.

Congrats to all our winners!