Chatbots for learning: A review of educational chatbots for the Facebook Messenger

With the exponential growth in the mobile device market over the last decade, chatbots are becoming an increasingly popular option to interact with users, and their popularity and adoption are rapidly spreading. These mobile devices change the way we communicate and allow ever-present learning in various environments. This study examined educational chatbots for Facebook Messenger to support learning. The independent web directory was screened to assess chatbots for this study resulting in the identification of 89 unique chatbots. Each chatbot was classified by language, subject matter and developer's platform. Finally, we evaluated 47 educational chatbots using the Facebook Messenger platform based on the analytic hierarchy process against the quality attributes of teaching, humanity, affect, and accessibility. We found that educational chatbots on the Facebook Messenger platform vary from the basic level of sending personalized messages to recommending learning content. Results show that chatbots which are part of the instant messaging application are still in its early stages to become artificial intelligence teaching assistants. The findings provide tips for teachers to integrate chatbots into classroom practice and advice what types of chatbots they can try out.Web of Science151art. no. 10386

CoAKTinG: Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid

Grid infrastructures coupled with semantic web linkage and reasoning open up intriguing new possibilities for scientific collaboration. In this short paper, we outline the research agenda and collaboration technologies under development within the CoAKTinG project: Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid. CoAKTinG will provide tools to assist scientific collaboration by integrating intelligent meeting spaces, ontologically annotated media streams from online meetings, decision rationale and group memory capture, meeting facilitation, issue handling, planning and coordination support, constraint satisfaction, and instant messaging/presence. Their integration is illustrated through an extended use scenario

Evaluation of anthropomorphic feedback for an online auction and affordances

This paper describes an experiment investigating the effectiveness and user satisfaction of using anthropomorphic feedback at the user interface. The context chosen was online bidding due to this kind of activity being very much used in current times by general users. The main results of the experiment were that there was a statistically significant effect observed for the time taken to place a bid in the anthropomorphic text condition. However there were no other significant effects for effectiveness issues and user satisfaction indicators. The results were also analysed in terms of the affordances and the main findings were that each of the four conditions tested in the experiment were probably equivalent in terms of their facilitating the affordances. Overall it may be more important to facilitate the affordances rather than a type of feedback being anthropomorphic in nature or not

Building a Facilitated Design Collaboration Environment

Complex design problems require members of project teams go beyond individualistic work to engage in joint activity of generating new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. Excellence in the design of GUIs requires creative problem solving. It is widely accepted that creative problem solving is most effective when individuals or groups employ a cyclic process of divergence-convergence consisting of three phases. In this paper we propose a collaborative environment for GUI design and evaluation, at the core of which is a process-based Agent Facilitator (AF). The advantage of this AF lies in its 1) focus on process of managing group dynamics rather than the content of the discussion, 2) democratic and non-obtrusive facilitation style, 3) strong feedback mechanism and 4) transparent collaboration and consensus making process. We discuss the system architecture and the implementation of a prototype extending the online chat mechanism. Although our initial effort has focused on the domain of Graphic User Interface (GUI) design, this framework is applicable to other design domains

Towards Agent-based Large-scale Decision Support System: The Effect of Facilitator

Good discussions are essential for group decisions, especially when the number of people in thea group has many people is large. So, it is important to Pprovidinge good support is critical for having establishing and maintaining coherent discussions that avoid some of thesuch anti-social bad behaviors, like as flaming, that have, which has been observed in some large discussion groups. We have developed a large-scale online decision support system that has facilitator support functions, and deployed it in case studies for several real-world online discussion supports as case studies. In this paper, weWe propose a facilitator-mediated online discussion model in order to lead discussions to in a better direction for ato reach decisions. Our extreme ultimate goal is an to realize automated facilitator agent that can adequately leadhelp participants to achieve reach reasonable decisions. In reality, online discussion is often fails plagued byinto flaming, , which is the act of posting or sending offensive messages during a discussion. Such flaming phenomena have been focused on as anti-social bad behavior of in online discussion forums. After several cases studies, we learned several lessons. Critically, The most important achievement is that in any all of our social experiments, no flaming has not been observed in our facilitator-mediated decision support system. Also, we obtained Our some insights also suggest in whichthat the social presence of a facilitator would have largegreatly aeffect for participants’ behavior

An Agent that Facilitates Crowd Discussion

Online discussion platforms are perceived as the next-generation method of citizen involvement. Such platforms can collect, integrate, and synthesize opinions to achieve social good. Crowd-scale platforms are being developed and deployed in social experiments that involve citizens and local governments. In such platforms, human facilitation is often used to preserve the quality of the discussions. Human facilitators often face difficulties when the discussions grow in size. In this paper, we present “D-agree, ” a crowd-scale discussion support system based on an automated facilitation agent. The agent extracts discussion structures from online discussions, analyzes them, and posts facilitation messages. We conducted small- and large-scale social experiments in Japan to assess the social impact of the platform. The results showcase the success of our automated facilitation agents in gathering valuable opinions from citizens. In addition, our experiments highlight the effect of an automated facilitation agent on online discussions. In particular, we find that combining the agent facilitator with human facilitators leads to higher user satisfaction

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Pro-active Meeting Assistants: Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all. This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all