Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1135] Workshop cfp
J.E.Whatley@salford.ac.uk
Date: Thu 15 Feb 2001 - 23:41:56 MET
From: J.E.Whatley@salford.ac.uk Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1135] Workshop cfp Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 11:41:56 +1300
CALL FOR PAPERS
First International Workshop on
AGENTS AND INTERNET LEARNING (AIL-2001)
To be held at the
Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2001)
Montreal, Canada
May 28th 2001
http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~mdb/ail2001/
The widespread adoption of the Internet as a means of delivering courses to
highly distributed groups of students has considerable advantages for both
Institutions and Learners. The need to meet the ever more demanding
requirements of a growing much more disparate student population must be met
effectively and efficiently with continuously reducing resources. Universities
are therefore turning to the Internet to deliver the courses that learners
require, at the times that they wish to study. The culture of the typical
University is changing as the traditional lecture-based methods of course
delivery give way to more flexible approaches. The preparation of online
course materials is very expensive, and there is considerable pressure to make
the maximum possible use of all the materials prepared. This can lead to
complex and confusing sites as courses come out of the pilot phase and numbers
of students taking different options rise.
A particular application area for agent technology is personal assistants, able
to work with a user and to adapt to users' needs. In the educational field there
is a role for personal assistant agents, specialised for working with the
particular type of information systems that make up educational systems.
Students, tutors and administrators may use these agents, both for searching
information sources and for management of learning activities. Students need
support when they are working, which may be at any time of the day or night.
As course delivery is globalised support will become more difficult to provide
as the University moves towards a twenty-four hour, seven days a week teaching
institution.
The use of group support agents is particularly interesting as learning in
higher education often incorporates an element of group project work. When
courses are transferred to an online mode of delivery, either to allow students
to work more flexible timetables allowing for other commitments, or over highly
dispersed locations, there is no longer an opportunity for face-to-face
discussion, which is important for the maintenance roles of group projects.
Another issue that needs to be addressed is the problem of isolation experienced
by many distance-learning students, who miss the help and support of their peers
in the conventional classroom situation.
We welcome contributions in these areas, also work to address these questions:
Can agents broker interaction between students experiencing similar difficulties?
Is this useful? Will it help students to complete their studies when otherwise
they might drop out?
Topics of Interest
We welcome the submission of papers from the full spectrum of issues associated
with security in mobile multi-agent systems, both in the public Internet and in
private networks. We particularly encourage the discussion of the following
topics:
* information agents to locate the material that a student requires to complete
some piece of work
* collaboration agents to find other students with similar interests that may be
able to help with a particular topic, or the specialist tutor that can discuss a
particular case study or practical
* support agents that assist students or student groups to achieve their goals
more effectively, by monitoring activity and suggesting appropriate strategies
* brokering agents that can build groups of students to undertake different
projects by negotiating with each other across the course. This would allow
groups of students to work together with the appropriate complementary sets of
skills across a wide geographic area, so that they will never meet face-to-face.
* Tutorial agents that will perform various roles of a tutor, but will be online
all the time, and available for consultation whenever the student so desires.
This can include giving advice on work currently being undertaken, suggesting
further sources of information, guiding the student to some further information
or activity, etc.
* Agent councillors that provide pastoral support when required
* Group support agents that support group activities by acting as raporteurs,
and provide assistance to group members when required.
The workshop aims to bring together people from a number of different communities,
such as Intelligent Agents, Agent Communication, Distance Learning and Internet
Agents. Consequently we would like to encourage discussion papers, conceptual
papers, system papers, and application papers. It is planned to publish a selection
of the workshop papers with a scientific publisher after the workshop.
Submission Details
To participate in the workshop you should submit an extended abstract of up to
1000 words (approximately 3 pages maximum) to the workshop chair, to arrive no
later than 19 March 2001. It is planned to structure the workshops into invited
talks, technical presentations and panel discussions. The technical presentations
will be selected from the research papers. Formatting instructions can be found
at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html and should be strictly
followed. The first page should include the full name and contact details of at
least one author (email and full postal address). Electronic submissions are
mandatory. Acceptable formats are PDF and PostScript.
Important Dates
Submissions due Monday 19th March 2001
Notifications sent Friday 30th March 2001
Camera ready version due Monday 16th April 2001
Workshop Monday 28th May 2001
Organisation:
Janice Whatley and Martin Beer (UK)
Program Committee
Martin Beer, University of Liverpool, UK
Janice Whatley, University of Salford, UK
Contact Person
Janice Whatley,
Information Systems Institute,
University of Salford,
Salford,
M5 4WT,
United Kingdom.
J.E.Whatley@salford.ac.uk
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