Software agents are well-suited to assisting users with routine, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks in various educational environments. In order to achieve complex tasks effectively, humans and agents sometimes need to work together. However, some issues in human agent interaction have not been solved properly, such as delegation, trust and privacy. The agent research community has focused on technologies for constructing autonomous agents and techniques for collaboration among agents. Little attention has been paid to supporting interactions between humans and agents. p* The objectives of this research are to investigate how easy it might be for a user to program his/her agent, how users behave when given the ability to program their agents, whether access to necessary help resources can be improved, and whether such a system can facilitate collaborative learning. Studying users concerns about their privacy and how an online learning environment can be built to protect users privacy are also interesting issues to us. <p>In this thesis two alternative systems were developed for programmable agents in which a human user can define a set of rules to direct an agents activities at execution time. The systems were built on top of a multi-agent collaborative learning environment that enables a user to program his or her agent to communicate with other agents and to monitor the activities of other users and their agents. These systems for end user programmable agents were evaluated and compared. The result demonstrated that an end-user programming environment is able to meet users individual needs on awareness information, facilitate the information exchange among the users, and enhance the communication between users within a virtual learning environment. This research provides a platform for investigating concerns over user privacy caused by agent programmability.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:USASK/oai:usask.ca:etd-08262004-115755 |
| Date | 26 August 2004 |
| Creators | Cao, Yang |
| Contributors | Vassileva, Julita, Proctor, Leonard F., Greer, J. E. (Jim), Cooke, John |
| Publisher | University of Saskatchewan |
| Source Sets | University of Saskatchewan Library |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-08262004-115755/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Saskatchewan or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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