How ironic that Scott Sheppard posted on his blog about an evil robot. We had hoped he wouldn't notice it, but he turned it into 3 blog posts and we had to develop a complex cover story and the name of Bishop for the robot so as to not disrupt our plan.  Evil Robot Under Construction? – It is Alive in the Lab, Autodesk Strategic Innovation: Armed and Dangerous, and Our robot is learning to draw

Now that Scott is on sabbatical and offline enjoying New Orleans with his lovely wife, Project Dilbert can commence and be announced. We originally thought that we would construct a robot that could replicate art like drawing and carving, but then Maurice Conti noticed that Scott Sheppard who sat on the other side of the robot might be a better suited use case for the robot. Maurice recalled the moment the idea crossed his mind that "Scott was so logical and task oriented and spock-like that is was all ones and zeroes and ideal for a robot to simulate." After all Autodesk CEO Carl Bass gave a talk at SXSW on the Robot Workforce."  There was also the added motivation if we could replace Scott with a robot we could reduce the teams overhead cost allowing use more budget for other projects. We brought in a team roboticist from Autodesk Research who sat directly across from Scott for the past few months studying Scott, his computer use managing Autodesk Labs, and of course his unique humor. Scott was not aware of this project and went about his normal work while the robot studied his mannerisms and work tasks.

Today the ScottBot-1 also known as Project Dilbert has started fully running Autodesk Labs. We have several project milestones to determine if this is a success, or not. The team plans to talk to it and endure it's robot generated humor each morning at 9:00am PDT and then it runs through the daily task list and emails teams that have not responded to their assigned action items.

Why did we name it Project Dilbert?
We found that the robot picked up all on its own the love of the comic strip Dilbert the same comic that Scott enjoys and forwards to team email aliases frequently. We live in a time of robots and artificial intelligence and this is just one of our research projects in this exciting field. This will definitely be interesting and no doubt some bumps in the road.

Robots are Alive in the Lab!

<April Fools>
While Scott is on sabbatical I am managing Autodesk Labs.