Intelligent cyber-instructors

• Main Author: Ho, Chiau Wai.
• Other Authors: Alexei Sourin
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems::Information storage and retrieval; DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computing methodologies::Artificial intelligence; DRNTU::Engineering::General::Education
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/48913
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

E-learning or Cyber-learning is an important and vital part of university education. However, when more and more information is provided electronically, it often results in disorientation and exhaust of the students. The students become more and more interested in personalized education where, ideally, their personal mentors would be able to help solve the educational problems. Cyber-instructors or virtual humans may become an excellent teaching tool implementing personal mentoring of students at affordable cost. They will be able to maintain conversation with the students as well as offer different educational services. To achieve these, it requires the design and development of interactive software tools with user-friendly interfaces allowing the lecturers to add contents to the "brains" of the cyber-instructors. In this project, a framework of the cyber-instructor based on commonly available software tools is proposed. The framework is modular with replaceable components, and can be easily adopted to particular educational needs and technical implementation. The main parts of the framework are the web server, chat engine, database system, and human-computer interface. This project studies the development of the knowledge database based on the open software AIML, and, specifically, the ALICE brain. Several implementations of the brain and the chat engine have been tested, which eventually allowed the author to come up with configurations suitable for maintaining different groups of learners and instructors, and the possibility of making quick run-time changes to the database. Various looks and feels of the HCI have been studied and implemented such as 3D talking avatar, web chat with multimedia components, and Blackboard learning management system integration module interface.