The team is extremely excited to announce this year's keynote speakers for Forge DevCon in Las Vegas!
Forge DevCon is a Monday pre-conference for Autodesk University in Las Vegas. This November, Forge DevCon is teaming up with Connect and Construct to bring you the largest Monday event yet. Forge DevCon takes place Monday, November 18, but the opportunities for Forge learning tracks and meeting the team don't stop there - you'll have plenty of opportunities to ask your Forge questions, meet with Forge leadership, and participate in Forge activities on the AU show floor throughout the week of November 19-21.
Meet the speakers
Chris Acheson, CEO and Founder, CADshare
Chris Acheson is a Chartered Mechanical Engineer with 20 years of experience working with both OEMs and plant operators. He is passionate about using digital transformation to allow manufacturers to not just do things better, but to do better things. Chris started CADshare in 2014 and devotes his energy to ensure manufacturers can gain real value from the introduction of new technologies. Focused entirely on the Aftermarket, Chris’ mission is to make identification and ordering of spare parts—the cornerstone for any good Aftermarket business—seamless.
Eric Lam, Board Member, DPR
A natural problem-solver and numbers man at heart, Eric studied civil engineering in school before his love for building steered him towards a master’s degree in construction management. During more than 30 years in construction and engineering, he has combined the best of both worlds. Eric has been instrumental in setting up preconstruction processes and operation systems that continue to serve as a foundation for DPR Construction today. A founding member of DPR’s Management Committee for 28 years, he now serves on the Board of Directors. He continues to help the company identify new opportunities to increase efficiencies in project delivery and better serve customers.
Jimmy Forsberg, Business Development Manager, Skanska Digital Hub
Jimmy Forsberg works as a project leader in Skanska Sweden’s Digital Hub, with focus on digital development and innovation at Skanska Sweden. His quest to help digitize Skanska's production team took off in 2014 as part of a program called Go mobile. Since 2015 he has, among many other things, been the program owner for BIM 360 where he has been part of driving the development and implementation work with the platform. He works daily to develop and support several of the softwares and platforms used by Skanska Sweden, all with the aim to create tools that meet the needs of his coworkers in the field. During the past year and a half, he has also become more and more involved in national projects whose purpose is to facilitate digitization throughout the industry in Sweden.
Susanna Holt, VP Forge Platform, Autodesk
As vice president of Forge at Autodesk, Susanna Holt drives the strategy and development of Autodesk's design-to-make platform - an ecosystem of building blocks and web services for software developers. She leads a team of nearly 700 software engineers and professionals in this endeavor.
A veteran of the software industry for more than 20 years, Susanna was most recently the senior director of the Autodesk Forge Software Engineering team. Prior to that she served as a software development manager and senior software developer in Autodesk's Cambridge office in the United Kingdom. With deep technical expertise in graphics and solid modeling, Susanna contributed to the solid modeling kernel used by AutoCAD, Inventor, and other Autodesk software products. Prior to Autodesk, Susanna was a software developer at D-Cubed where she consulted for Spatial, Inc. (acquired by Dassault Systèmes and where she contributed to the team building a geometric solid modeler.
Susanna received her doctoral degree in mathematics from Heriot-Watt University and her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Susanna taught mathematics at the Open University and is a Women's Masters and Mixed Masters rowing champion.
If you don't have your pass for Forge DevCon yet, you can get one here. Register today! Classes will fill up quickly and this event is expected to sell out.