Designing Distributed Learning Environments with Intelligent Software Agents

Designing Distributed Learning Environments with Intelligent Software Agents reports on the most recent advances in agent technologies for distributed learning. Chapters are devoted to the various aspects of intelligent software agents in distributed learning, including the methodological and technical issues on where and how intelligent agents can contribute to meeting distributed learning needs today and tomorrow. This book benefits the AI (artificial intelligence) and educational communities in their research and development, offering new and interesting research issues surrounding the development of distributed learning environments in the Semantic Web age. In addition, the ideas presented in the book are applicable to other domains such as Agent-Supported Web Services, distributed business process and resource integration, computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) and e-Commerce.

Dr. Fuhua Lin is an Associate Professor, Computing and Information Systems at Athabasca University. He is conducting research in Intelligent Systems, Multiple Agent Systems, Knowledge Engineering, and Petri nets and has published about 40 papers in journals and referred conference proceedings in these areas. He worked as an assistant research officer in the Institute for Information Technology at the National Research Council of Canada and as a postdoctoral fellow in Intelligent Systems Group at the University of Calgary. He obtained his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 1998, his Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence from South China University of Technology of China in 1992, and B.Sc in Mathematics from South China University of Technology of China in 1982.