Social and Affective Agents to Motivate Collaboration on Agent-Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Abstract

This chapter presents a social and affective agent, named social agent, that has been modeled using probabilistic networks in order to support and motivate collaboration in an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). The social agent suggests to students a workgroup to join in. Our testbed ITS is called AMPLIA, a probabilistic multiagent environment to support the diagnostic reasoning development and the diagnostic hypotheses modeling of domains with complex and uncertain knowledge, as the medical area. The AMPLIA environment is one of the educational systems, integrated in Portedu, which is a Web portal that provides access to educational contents and systems. The social agent belongs to Portedu platform and it is used by AMPLIA. The social agent reasoning is based on individual aspects, such as learning style, performance, affective state, personality traits, and group aspects, as acceptance and social skills. The chapter also presents some experiments using AMPLIA, and results obtained by the social agent.