20,636 research outputs found
Together we stand, Together we fall, Together we win: Dynamic Team Formation in Massive Open Online Courses
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer a new scalable paradigm for
e-learning by providing students with global exposure and opportunities for
connecting and interacting with millions of people all around the world. Very
often, students work as teams to effectively accomplish course related tasks.
However, due to lack of face to face interaction, it becomes difficult for MOOC
students to collaborate. Additionally, the instructor also faces challenges in
manually organizing students into teams because students flock to these MOOCs
in huge numbers. Thus, the proposed research is aimed at developing a robust
methodology for dynamic team formation in MOOCs, the theoretical framework for
which is grounded at the confluence of organizational team theory, social
network analysis and machine learning. A prerequisite for such an undertaking
is that we understand the fact that, each and every informal tie established
among students offers the opportunities to influence and be influenced.
Therefore, we aim to extract value from the inherent connectedness of students
in the MOOC. These connections carry with them radical implications for the way
students understand each other in the networked learning community. Our
approach will enable course instructors to automatically group students in
teams that have fairly balanced social connections with their peers, well
defined in terms of appropriately selected qualitative and quantitative network
metrics.Comment: In Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Conference on Application of
Digital Information & Web Technologies (ICADIWT), India, February 2014 (6
pages, 3 figures
Towards Flexible Teamwork
Many AI researchers are today striving to build agent teams for complex,
dynamic multi-agent domains, with intended applications in arenas such as
education, training, entertainment, information integration, and collective
robotics. Unfortunately, uncertainties in these complex, dynamic domains
obstruct coherent teamwork. In particular, team members often encounter
differing, incomplete, and possibly inconsistent views of their environment.
Furthermore, team members can unexpectedly fail in fulfilling responsibilities
or discover unexpected opportunities. Highly flexible coordination and
communication is key in addressing such uncertainties. Simply fitting
individual agents with precomputed coordination plans will not do, for their
inflexibility can cause severe failures in teamwork, and their
domain-specificity hinders reusability. Our central hypothesis is that the key
to such flexibility and reusability is providing agents with general models of
teamwork. Agents exploit such models to autonomously reason about coordination
and communication, providing requisite flexibility. Furthermore, the models
enable reuse across domains, both saving implementation effort and enforcing
consistency. This article presents one general, implemented model of teamwork,
called STEAM. The basic building block of teamwork in STEAM is joint intentions
(Cohen & Levesque, 1991b); teamwork in STEAM is based on agents' building up a
(partial) hierarchy of joint intentions (this hierarchy is seen to parallel
Grosz & Kraus's partial SharedPlans, 1996). Furthermore, in STEAM, team members
monitor the team's and individual members' performance, reorganizing the team
as necessary. Finally, decision-theoretic communication selectivity in STEAM
ensures reduction in communication overheads of teamwork, with appropriate
sensitivity to the environmental conditions. This article describes STEAM's
application in three different complex domains, and presents detailed empirical
results.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for an online appendix and other files
accompanying this articl
Artificial Intelligence and Systems Theory: Applied to Cooperative Robots
This paper describes an approach to the design of a population of cooperative
robots based on concepts borrowed from Systems Theory and Artificial
Intelligence. The research has been developed under the SocRob project, carried
out by the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Institute for Systems and
Robotics - Instituto Superior Tecnico (ISR/IST) in Lisbon. The acronym of the
project stands both for "Society of Robots" and "Soccer Robots", the case study
where we are testing our population of robots. Designing soccer robots is a
very challenging problem, where the robots must act not only to shoot a ball
towards the goal, but also to detect and avoid static (walls, stopped robots)
and dynamic (moving robots) obstacles. Furthermore, they must cooperate to
defeat an opposing team. Our past and current research in soccer robotics
includes cooperative sensor fusion for world modeling, object recognition and
tracking, robot navigation, multi-robot distributed task planning and
coordination, including cooperative reinforcement learning in cooperative and
adversarial environments, and behavior-based architectures for real time task
execution of cooperating robot teams
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
Human-agent collectives
We live in a world where a host of computer systems, distributed throughout our physical and information environments, are increasingly implicated in our everyday actions. Computer technologies impact all aspects of our lives and our relationship with the digital has fundamentally altered as computers have moved out of the workplace and away from the desktop. Networked computers, tablets, phones and personal devices are now commonplace, as are an increasingly diverse set of digital devices built into the world around us. Data and information is generated at unprecedented speeds and volumes from an increasingly diverse range of sources. It is then combined in unforeseen ways, limited only by human imagination. People’s activities and collaborations are becoming ever more dependent upon and intertwined with this ubiquitous information substrate. As these trends continue apace, it is becoming apparent that many endeavours involve the symbiotic interleaving of humans and computers. Moreover, the emergence of these close-knit partnerships is inducing profound change. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines that wait until they are asked before doing anything, we will work in tandem with highly inter-connected computational components that act autonomously and intelligently (aka agents). As a consequence, greater attention needs to be given to the balance of control between people and machines. In many situations, humans will be in charge and agents will predominantly act in a supporting role. In other cases, however, the agents will be in control and humans will play the supporting role. We term this emerging class of systems human-agent collectives (HACs) to reflect the close partnership and the flexible social interactions between the humans and the computers. As well as exhibiting increased autonomy, such systems will be inherently open and social. This means the participants will need to continually and flexibly establish and manage a range of social relationships. Thus, depending on the task at hand, different constellations of people, resources, and information will need to come together, operate in a coordinated fashion, and then disband. The openness and presence of many distinct stakeholders means participation will be motivated by a broad range of incentives rather than diktat. This article outlines the key research challenges involved in developing a comprehensive understanding of HACs. To illuminate this agenda, a nascent application in the domain of disaster response is presented
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