Adaptive-course development is a complex activity, and it results more difficult as the flexibility of the course grows, i.e. as the number of adaptive features increases. Particularly, it is difficult to evaluate whether the course fulfills the needs of each kind of student. This task, which should be continuously carried out while the course is available for old and new students, is very comp...

This paper presents an autonomous intelligent agent developed for health care in geriatric residences. The paper focuses on the construction of an autonomous agent which incorporates a model of human thinking, such as reasoning based on past experiences. The work here presented focuses in the development of the CBP internal structure. The planning mechanism has been implemented by means of a no...

This paper describes research concerned with designing an architecture for an autonomous agent with human-like capabilities. This research follows on from the PhD work of Luc Beaudoin and considers a number of the implementational issues. The work is framed in terms of a user coming to terms with the use of the Birmingham SIM AGENT toolkit, and research issues related to the development of broa...

This paper discusses a new methodological approach to designing software for autonomous agents. For real autonomy such systems must be equipped with a motivational subsystem that drives the agent and selects among its possible behaviors. We present a methodology that supports the design of such a system and discuss its relation to theoretical biology, particularly the work of Jakob von Uexk ull...

Inspired by the Vowels approach, the Vowel Agent Argumentation Architecture (V3A) is a model by means of which an autonomous agent argues with itself to manage its motivations. It arbitrates its possible internal conflicts with the help of its personnality which dictates its behaviour. In order to show how this model can be used to design self-adative agents, we propose an argumentation techniq...

AAMAS is the premier scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multiagent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as a merger of three highly respected individual conferences: the International Conference on Autonomous Agents, the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, and the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems. ...

This paper examines the potential and the impact of introducing learning capabilities into autonomous agents that make decisions at run-time about which mechanism to exploit in order to coordinate their activities. Specifically, the efficacy of learning is evaluated for making the decisions that are involved in determining when and how to coordinate. Our motivating hypothesis is that to deal wi...

We consider settings in which a semi-autonomous agent has uncertain knowledge about its environment, but can ask what action the human operator would prefer taking in the current or in a potential future state. Asking queries can improve behavior, but if queries come at a cost (e.g., due to limited operator attention), the value of each query should be maximized. We compare two strategies for s...

This paper introduces a simulation environment which is supposed to facilitate the study of behavior-based concepts by providing the user with a look at the dynamics inside the agent. Additionally we argue for more advanced environments in which agents may be able to show more interesting behavior.

This paper investigates the skills of autonomous agents to reorganize their society as answer to environmental changes. The reorganization of an agent society can be motivated by the desire to reduce connicts within inter-agent cooperation and to increase the eeciency in achieving goals. Our interest is centered on situations where new agents want to join an existing agent society which has est...