Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Games for a new climate: experiencing the complexity of future risks

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.This report is a product of the Pardee Center Task Force on Games for a New Climate, which met at Pardee House at Boston University in March 2012. The 12-member Task Force was convened on behalf of the Pardee Center by Visiting Research Fellow Pablo Suarez in collaboration with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre to “explore the potential of participatory, game-based processes for accelerating learning, fostering dialogue, and promoting action through real-world decisions affecting the longer-range future, with an emphasis on humanitarian and development work, particularly involving climate risk management.” Compiled and edited by Janot Mendler de Suarez, Pablo Suarez and Carina Bachofen, the report includes contributions from all of the Task Force members and provides a detailed exploration of the current and potential ways in which games can be used to help a variety of stakeholders – including subsistence farmers, humanitarian workers, scientists, policymakers, and donors – to both understand and experience the difficulty and risks involved related to decision-making in a complex and uncertain future. The dozen Task Force experts who contributed to the report represent academic institutions, humanitarian organization, other non-governmental organizations, and game design firms with backgrounds ranging from climate modeling and anthropology to community-level disaster management and national and global policymaking as well as game design.Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centr

From conditioning to learning communities: Implications of fifty years of research in e‐learning interaction design

This paper will consider e‐learning in terms of the underlying learning processes and interactions that are stimulated, supported or favoured by new media and the contexts or communities in which it is used. We will review and critique a selection of research and development from the past fifty years that has linked pedagogical and learning theory to the design of innovative e‐learning systems and activities, and discuss their implications. It will include approaches that are, essentially, behaviourist (Skinner and Gagné), cognitivist (Pask, Piaget and Papert), situated (Lave, Wenger and Seely‐Brown), socio‐constructivist (Vygotsky), socio‐cultural (Nardi and Engestrom) and community‐based (Wenger and Preece). Emerging from this review is the argument that effective e‐learning usually requires, or involves, high‐quality educational discourse, that leads to, at the least, improved knowledge, and at the best, conceptual development and improved understanding. To achieve this I argue that we need to adopt a more holistic approach to design that synthesizes features of the included approaches, leading to a framework that emphasizes the relationships between cognitive changes, dialogue processes and the communities, or contexts for e‐learning

The BURCHAK corpus: a Challenge Data Set for Interactive Learning of Visually Grounded Word Meanings

We motivate and describe a new freely available human-human dialogue dataset for interactive learning of visually grounded word meanings through ostensive definition by a tutor to a learner. The data has been collected using a novel, character-by-character variant of the DiET chat tool (Healey et al., 2003; Mills and Healey, submitted) with a novel task, where a Learner needs to learn invented visual attribute words (such as " burchak " for square) from a tutor. As such, the text-based interactions closely resemble face-to-face conversation and thus contain many of the linguistic phenomena encountered in natural, spontaneous dialogue. These include self-and other-correction, mid-sentence continuations, interruptions, overlaps, fillers, and hedges. We also present a generic n-gram framework for building user (i.e. tutor) simulations from this type of incremental data, which is freely available to researchers. We show that the simulations produce outputs that are similar to the original data (e.g. 78% turn match similarity). Finally, we train and evaluate a Reinforcement Learning dialogue control agent for learning visually grounded word meanings, trained from the BURCHAK corpus. The learned policy shows comparable performance to a rule-based system built previously.Comment: 10 pages, THE 6TH WORKSHOP ON VISION AND LANGUAGE (VL'17

Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systems

In this paper we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation of dialogue systems. Evaluation is a crucial part during the development process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations and questionnaires. However, this tends to be very cost and time intensive. Thus, much work has been put into finding methods, which allow to reduce the involvement of human labour. In this survey, we present the main concepts and methods. For this, we differentiate between the various classes of dialogue systems (task-oriented dialogue systems, conversational dialogue systems, and question-answering dialogue systems). We cover each class by introducing the main technologies developed for the dialogue systems and then by presenting the evaluation methods regarding this class

Variable time scales, agent-based models, and role-playing games: The PIEPLUE river basin management game

This article presents a specific association of a role-playing game (RPG) and an agent-based model (ABM) aimed at dealing with a large range of time scales. Applications to the field of natural resource management lead one to consider the short time scale of resource use in practice at the same time as the longer ones related to resource dynamics or actors' investments. In their daily practice, stakeholders are translating their long-term strategies, a translation that is contextualized and combined with some cooccurring events. Long-term thinking is required for sustainable use of natural resources, but it should take into account its necessary adaptation on a short time scale. This raises the necessity for tools able to tackle jointly these various time scales. The similarity of architecture between computerized ABMs and RPGs makes them easy to associate in a hybrid tool, targeted at meeting this requirement. The proposition of this article is to allocate the representation of short time scales to computerized ABMs and the long ones to RPGs, while keeping the same static structural conceptual model, shared as a common root by both. This synergy is illustrated with PIEPLUE, an interactive setting tackling water-sharing issues.GESTION DE L'EAU;BASSIN VERSANT;RESSOURCE NATURELLE;MODELE;JEU DE ROLE;SYSTEME MULTIAGENTS;AGENT-BASED MODEL;CASE STUDY OF WATER SHARING;CONCEPTUAL MODEL;HYBRID TOOL;INVESTMENTS;LONG-TERM ISSUES;NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT;PIEPLUE;PARTICIPATORY MODELING;RESOURCE DYNAMICS;RESOURCE USE;ROLE-PLAYING GAME;STAKEHOLDERS;SUSTAINABLE USE OF NATURAL RESOURCES;TIME-SCALE DIVERSITY;VARIABLE TIME SCALES;WATER MANAGEMENT

Exploring miscommunication and collaborative behaviour in human-robot interaction

This paper presents the first step in designing a speech-enabled robot that is capable of natural management of miscommunication. It describes the methods and results of two WOz studies, in which dyads of naïve participants interacted in a collaborative task. The first WOz study explored human miscommunication management. The second study investigated how shared visual space and monitoring shape the processes of feedback and communication in task-oriented interactions. The results provide insights for the development of human-inspired and robust natural language interfaces in robots

The match between climate services demands and Earth System Models supplies

Earth System Models (ESM) are key ingredients of many of the climate services that are currently being developed and delivered. However, ESMs have more applications than the provision of climate services, and similarly many climate services use more sources of information than ESMs. This discussion paper elaborates on dilemmas that are evident at the interface between ESMs and climate services, in particular: (a) purposes of the models versus service development, (b) gap between the spatial and temporal scales of the models versus the scales needed in applications, and (c) Tailoring climate model results to real-world applications. A continued and broad-minded dialogue between the ESM developers and climate services providers’ communities is needed to improve both the optimal use and direction of ESM development and climate service development. We put forward considerations to improve this dialogue between the communities developing ESMs and climate services, in order to increase the mutual benefit that enhanced understanding of prospects and limitations of ESMs and climate services will bring.This work and its contributors (B. van den Hurk, C. Hewitt, J. Bessembinder, F. Doblas-Reyes, R. Döscher) were funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union: Project ref. 689029 (Climateurope project). The co-author and editor of the journal states that she was not involved in the review process of the paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Using Computational Agents to Design Participatory Social Simulations

In social science, the role of stakeholders is increasing in the development and use of simulation models. Their participation in the design of agent-based models (ABMs) has widely been considered as an efficient solution to the validation of this particular type of model. Traditionally, "agents" (as basic model elements) have not been concerned with stakeholders directly but via designers or role-playing games (RPGs). In this paper, we intend to bridge this gap by introducing computational or software agents, implemented from an initial ABM, into a new kind of RPG, mediated by computers, so that these agents can interact with stakeholders. This interaction can help not only to elicit stakeholders' informal knowledge or unpredicted behaviours, but also to control stakeholders' focus during the games. We therefore formalize a general participatory design method using software agents, and illustrate it by describing our experience in a project aimed at developing agent-based social simulations in the field of air traffic management.Participatory Social Simulations, Agent-Based Social Simulations, Computational Agents, Role-Playing Games, Artificial Maieutics, User-Centered Design