I had a great time attending the IASS 2024 Symposium on 'Redefining Structural Art'. A sincere thank you once again to the organisers and to everyone I had the pleasure of reconnecting with, especially my wonderful former advisors and colleagues at the Block Research Group. Perhaps one of the greatest delights was the engaging Heinz Isler tour organised by the lovely Giulia Boller.

I was pleased to have hosted the workshop on applying machine learning in structural design with Pierluigi D'Acunto, Lazlo Bleker, Karla Saldaña Ochoa, Zifeng Guo.

Additionally, I was delighted to have contributed two submissions to the conference proceedings:

❶ A collaboration with Pierluigi D'Acunto at TUM that developed a grammar-based environment for training reinforcement learning models to generate equilibrium structures using the CEM form-finding method. Special thanks to Lazlo Bleker for his excellent work. https://lnkd.in/geun8qES

❷ A preliminary investigation into how variations in techniques for describing reticulated designs in text affected the quality of their Large Language Model embedding spaces in reflecting meaningful design distances and preserving design information. https://lnkd.in/gkAK5GMY

Looking forward to seeing everyone again on IASS 2025!

~Mark