This article presents a vision of intelligent learning systems that use sensitive and effective pedagogical agents to deliver personal and individualized tutoring or therapy. The systems and their underlying technologies need to be powerful, yet flexible enough to deliver a wide range of media-rich interventions to individuals with vastly different needs across environments as diverse as classr...

This paper presents and analyses data from a usability experiment conducted at the University of Bergen in Norway. The experiment is entitled CoPAS: Collaboration Patterns Agent Simulation. CoPAS is a simulation study carried out with the Wizard of Oz technique. Students used a groupware system, TeamWave Workplace, to solve a learning task in the domain of object-oriented analysis and design us...

This paper presents a pedagogical agent designed to support students in an embodied, discovery-based learning environment. Discovery-based learning guides students through a set of activities designed to foster particular insights. In this case, the animated agent explains how to use the Mathematical Imagery Trainer for Proportionality, provides performance feedback, leads students to have diff...

The paper addresses aspects of virtual pedagogical agents’ visual style (realism – iconization) in relation to their social style (task oriented – relation oriented). Two studies are presented that investigate which visual and social styles users prefer and how they articulate their preferences. The first study involved 42 university students; the second study involved 90 elementary school chil...

We describe the design and evaluation of an affective pedagogical agent persona for Intelligent Tutoring Systems. The goal of our research was to develop an agent embodying a persona of a caring mentor interested in the learner’s progress. The agent’s behaviour is guided by a set of rules that are triggered by the states of the session history. Four agents were integrated with EER-Tutor for a f...

The goal of this research is to determine whether a computer based training game (HEART-SENSE) can improve recognition of heart attack symptoms and shift behavioral issues so as to reduce pre-hospitalization delay in seeking treatment. Since treatment delay correlates with adverse outcomes, this research could reduce myocardial infarction mortality and morbidity. In Phase I we created and evalu...

Interactive virtual worlds provide a powerful medium for experiential learning. Intelligent virtual agents can cohabit virtual worlds with people and facilitate such learning as guides, mentors, and teammates. This paper reviews the main pedagogical advantages of animated agents in virtual worlds, discusses two key research challenges, and outlines an ambitious new project addressing those chal...

The computer-assisted learning is a very modern study area, which can be applied to the learning process. The main objective of this paper is to present a software system for online learning based on the intelligent software agents technologies. The main ideas on which this paper is built are: to any person is associated a learning profile (the idea is based on the existence of multiple intelli...