Despite winning Siemens Inventor of the Year in 2017, Arquimedes Canedo doesn’t actually make anything. Or at least, he doesn’t make physical things. As a computer engineer, with a focus on automation, he programs machines to do things. Arquimedes is a Principal at Siemens flagship R&D facility in Princeton based on the outskirts of New York, where he spends half of his day working on new technology, and the other half managing it.
“My team produces cutting edge ideas,” he says. “So we need to encourage people to be really radical.” As a Principal, he oversees strategy and what technology they should be developing. “But I want to make it clear,” he says. “I don’t manage people. I manage research and ideas.” Although he may not work directly with people, the things he creates make our lives infinitely better.
Testing new ideas out in a virtual world makes reality better
Arquimedes won the prestigious prize of Inventor of the year for a world first — a graph that plots the relationship between digital twins. “The digital twin will revolutionize all objects,” he says. “All of a sudden we’ll have virtual replicas of objects living in the cloud.”
Digital twins are virtual replicas of objects. They’re living digital simulations. Arquimedes’ graph takes this technology to the next level by linking them all together. “Imagine you want to build an airplane,” he says. “You need to think about all the different components — from the mechanical and electrical to acoustic and electromagnetic parts.” All these different elements, from the material to how a product is used to the environment, shape how it’s engineered. With Arquimedes’ graph, this could all be done virtually by algorithms that can figure out complex calculations in next to no time.
Allowing objects to report back once they’re out in the real world
It’s easy to consider how something as complex and dynamic as an airplane is made up of many different components, but the process can be applied to anything. Take a paper cup, designed to keep coffee warm. An engineer will spend ages searching for the right compositions of function, behavior, and structure. They’ll rigorously fail over and over again until they get it right. “Engineers are very hands-on,” he says. “They’re makers. They like to delve into a design by tweaking things again and again until it’s perfect.”
It’s impossible for a single person to fathom all these nuances and unforeseen problems, but with digital twin technology feeding information into Arquimedes’ graph they’re suddenly calculated in the blink of an eye. “Over time we can capture what happens to an object,” he says, “from the moment an engineer comes up with the idea and makes a prototype, through to the point of sale and beyond.”
Currently, the second a product gets into the hands of consumers, all those countless hours engineers spend searching for perfection comes to an end. Out in the ether, the engineer is blind as to how their creation is used in the real world. But the graph has the potential to change that. In the future, all products could have a tiny chip that sends back a constant stream of encrypted data telling the graph how it reacts to different environments.
Are we asking the impossible of engineers?
The more technology can work out problems, the more time engineers have to be creative. But it also means they need to think in a new way. “I think one of the big struggles of how old school engineers were educated was that they were siloed,” he says. “Mechanical engineers were only taught to think about structure and materials, and then it gets passed on to an electrical engineer, who thinks only about signals, electric circuits, and then a computer engineer who only thinks about software data structures and so on. The new generation of engineers need to be aware of other disciplines but it’s really hard because throughout education you’re not taught to fully understand those other areas.”
Who should have the burden of responsibility?
Expecting any person to know everything is an impossible ask. So Arquimedes wants technology to take on that burden while engineers focus on developing their own creative ideas. At the moment, if someone wants to make a machine do something for them, they have to code it. But what if you could tell it what you want it to do? “What if instead of writing code, you just draw pictures on a whiteboard?” he says. “Imagine if the whiteboard was connected to a computer with a camera. It could see what you’re drawing and just build the program for you. All it would take is a diagram with very little text.”
Ever since he was a young boy growing up in Mexico, he’s been hooked on what he describes as the “subtle feeling loop” of combing software with physical things. A computer engineer spends ages developing something, but it’s finished all they see is lines of code running across a computer screen. “When the end product becomes tangible, it’s like the software is tangible,” he says. “That’s what captures my imagination. Once you see something come to life.”
“It’s simple but linking things has a tremendous power,” he says. “We can use it to create truly autonomous systems by creating something, either an agent or actual machines, that goes into the digital twin graph and does all the calculations that are currently impossible.”
Interdisciplinarity is forcing engineers to abandon their assumptions
The term engineer means many things to many people. Fundamentally it’s used to describe someone who designs, builds, or maintains machines or structures. But it’s also used to distinguish a type of craftsmanship: an expert can engineer, orchestrate, and choreograph ideas and turn them into something that is refined and innovative.
It wasn’t until Arquimedes began working at Siemens that he really understood how diverse the role is. “When you are in the world of software,” he says. “Everything is abstracted away because it’s represented in a data structure, algorithm, or computer program. When I joined Siemens, I was exposed to true engineering. For the first time, I understood how important it isfor a true engineer, not a computer engineer, to think in a multidisciplinary way.”
Simplicity means stripping ideas right back to understand their true purpose
Before an engineer can imagine how something will look, feel and behave they have to strip all their ideas back in order to try and answer one fundamental question. Is this going to do everything I need it to? “There’s an interplay between what you design, how you’re going to build it, and which materials you use, and what kind of software you write,” he explains. “The next evolution in design will be about how we input stuff. It’s not about sitting behind a desk anymore. It’s about finding out how we express ideas and supporting that creative process.”. hThere are some things computers are infinitely better at than us, but ultimately it will be down to people to bring the human touch all new ideas need to succeed.
Arquimedes Canedo is a Principal Key Expert Scientist of Engineering at at Corporate Technology in Princeton, New Jersey. He grew up in Mexico City, and went on to study his Masters and PhD in Tokyo. Find out more about working at Siemens.
