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Multi-Agent Systems for Education and Interactive Entertainment: Design, Use and Experience

Multi-Agent Systems for Education and Interactive Entertainment: Design, Use and Experience
Author(s)/Editor(s): Martin Beer (Sheffield Hallam University, UK), Maria Fasli (University of Essex, UK)and Debbie Richards (Macquarie University, Australia)
Copyright: ©2011
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-080-8
ISBN13: 9781609600808
ISBN10: 1609600800
EISBN13: 9781609600822

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Description

The increased sophistication of the multi-agent software now becoming available is allowing much more sophisticated learning scenarios to be attempted. This has caused interest in the role of artificial intelligence in interactive systems to grow in recent years. Increasingly powerful consumer hardware makes research-level AI usable in real-world games and/or immersive learning environments.

Multi-Agent Systems for Education and Interactive Entertainment: Design, Use and Experience presents readers with a rich collection of ideas from researchers who are exploring the complex tradeoffs that must be made in designing agent systems for education and interactive entertainment. This book aims to provide a mixture of relevant theoretical and practical understanding of the use of multi-agent systems in educational and entertainment research, together with practical examples of the use of such systems in real application scenarios.



Preface

This book is based on a selection of papers presented at the International Workshop on the Educational Uses of Multi-Agent Systems (EduMAS) which was held in conjunction with the International Workshop on Agent Based Systems for Human Learning and Entertainment (ABSHLE) at the Eighth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) held in Budapest Hungary, in May 2009.  This was the latest of a series of workshops dating from 2004 (EduMAS) and 2005 (ABSHL(E)), each of which has explored both the educational opportunities offered by Multi-Agent systems and educational uses of such systems to provide much more interactive and realistic educational and educational scenarios.  

This structure is reflected in the two major sections of this book.  The first explores the educational opportunities both within the Computing subject area and those that have been explored in other subject areas.  The first two chapters explore the capabilities and uses of NetLogo.  The third chapter investigates how creative design can be incorporated more effectively into Software Engineering courses, which all too often concentrate on the technological design issues, rather than creativity.  The fourth chapter considers how the introduction of Multi-Agent concepts can be used to better explain the many complex concepts that are part of the study of Computing.

The second section of the book looks at some of the ways that the technology can be used to assist in presenting often complex educational, training and other material much more effectively.  The first two chapters explore the use of agents and MAS as a means to assist learning. A number of tensions accompany the use of agents in these contexts, since the goal is not to simulate Autonomous Agents for their own sake, but to use them to create an interactive experience with a pre-defined goal for the human user: either to learn a curriculum or to experience an engaging and rich world (or both, in the case of "edutainment"). Unlike fully author-controlled experiences  such as films and plays, or fully scripted computer-aided instructional systems, dynamic interactive experiences require a world that can appropriately and meaningfully respond to the user - a natural fit for intelligent and believable agents. At the same time, however, system designers want to shape users' experiences, presenting new research challenges to address the interplay between player autonomy and designer intent. Thus, within this area of research, there is a design space that ranges from complete autonomy for agents to complete control for an agent coordinator.  

The final five chapters explore specific issues related to the development of educational and entertainment activities using Multi-Agent systems.  The first explores some of the issues that need to be considered when developing educational materials using Multi-Agent technology, the second introduces the need to consider emotion into the Human-Agent interactions, the third presents a method by which such materials can be developed more rapidly and cost effectively, involving the domain experts in the design process. The fourth chapter introduces the advantages of personalisation and the final chapter recounts experiences in using recommender agents to assist students to understand the uses of agency for solving real world problems.

The range of topics covered is extensive, and introduces many of the issues that need to be addressed if the educational, training and entertainment capabilities of Multi-Agent systems are to be realised fully over the next few years.  We hope that you find this book informative and that it helps you to understand the capabilities offered by introducing agents into your learning, teaching and educational environments.

Martin Beer
Debbie Richards
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Reviews and Testimonials

The range of topics covered is extensive, and introduces many of the issues that need to be addressed if the educational, training and entertainment capabilities of Multi-Agent systems are to be realised fully over the next few years.

– Martin Beer, Sheffield Hallam University, UK; Maria Fasli, University of Essex, UK; and Debbie Richards, Macquarie University, Australia

Author's/Editor's Biography

Martin Beer (Ed.)

Martin Beer is a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Computing and the Communications and Computing Research Centre of Sheffield Hallam University. His research interests include the use of agents to assist learners in collaborative online learning environments and in the management of care for the elderly and others, such as autism sufferers, developing improved multilingual support within relational database systems, improved design techniques for mobile applications and the development of personalisation services within recommender systems for local government and other public services. He has organised workshops considering the educational issues of multi-agent systems at AAMAS at Budapest in 2009 and AAMAS at Toronto in 2010. He is one of the organisers of a similar workshop at AAMAS at Taipai in 2011. He is a Chartered Engineer, Chartered Scientist and Fellow of the British Computer Society.



Maria Fasli (Ed.)

Maria Fasli is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex. She obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2000. Her current research interests lie in agents and their theoretical foundations and practical applications such as electronic markets, web service discovery and composition, web search and dynamic user profiles. She has published papers on logics for reasoning agents, formal models of multi-agent systems, trading agents and platforms, trust, and web search assistants. She is the author of “Agent Technology for E-commerce” (John Wiley and Sons, 2007). Her interests extend to technology-enhanced learning and she was also awarded a National Teaching Fellowship for her innovative approaches to learning and teaching.



Debbie Richards (Ed.)

Debbie Richards is currently an Associate Professor in the Computing Department at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She has been interested in expertise and knowledge from a theoretical and practical point of view since the early 80s. This was initially inspired by her work in the ICT industry with experts and explored further in her Masters and PhD theses, following completion of a Bachelor of Business. Virtual worlds provide much potential for educating and training people using safe environments with greater ecological validity than a laboratory or classroom setting. Agent-based systems provide the intelligence needed to achieve this experience. Currently she is working, with Meredith, on developing a Multi-User Virtual Environment for science inquiry in Australian secondary schools. Our key challenge is creating intelligent animals and avatars to allow students to observe and interact with advanced behaviours such as predator-prey and flocking. The world is being built using Unity3D, chosen as a result of the study conducted by Arda.



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