Dorothy is an integrated 3D/robotics educational tool created by augmenting the Alice programming environment for teaching core computing skills to students without prior programming experience. The tool provides a drag and drop interface to create graphical routines in virtual worlds; these routines are automatically translated into code to provide a real-time or offline enactment on mobile robots in the real world. This paper summarizes the key capabilities of Dorothy, and describes the contributions made to: (a) enhance the bidirectional communication between the virtual interface and robots; and (b) support multirobot collaboration. Specifically, we describe the ability to automatically revise the virtual world based on sensor data obtained from robots, creating or deleting objects in the virtual world based on their observed presence or absence in the real world. Furthermore, we describe the use of visually observed behavior of teammates for collaboration between robots when they cannot communicate with each other. Dorothy thus helps illustrate sophisticated algorithms for fundamental challenges in robotics and AI to teach advanced computing concepts, and to emphasize the importance of computing in real world applications, to beginning programmers.

Those CIOs starting to implement machine learning projects in their organizations should pay attention to the quality and source of their data, according to Ed Featherston, VP and principal architect at cloud computing consulting firm Cloud Technology Partners. Featherston spoke with SearchCIO at the recent Cloud Expo in New York. In this video, he offers pointers on how CIOs can prepare their organizations for machine learning projects and explains the need for figuring out the best way to transport their data into machine learning algorithms. He also sheds light on how internet-connected devices and crowdsourced data are changing data pedigree, and explains why candidates with data science skills are a top priority for CIOs hiring for machine learning projects. Read excerpts of the interview below, or click on the player to hear the interview in its entirety.

Featherston spoke with SearchCIO at the recent Cloud Expo in New York. In this video, he explains how machine learning systems can help CIOs identify patterns in big data sets and delineates how the rail industry is saving money on maintenance costs by putting machine learning algorithms to use. He also explains how to identify what projects are right for machine learning enhancements and enumerates some of the challenges that CIOs should expect when implementing machine learning for big data analytics. What opportunities do machine learning systems offer CIOs? Ed Featherston: It's an interesting new world for CIOs because they've always had lots of data, have tried to analyze it in different ways and identify the patterns that are in there.