Commercializing a multiagent-supported collaborative system

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we describe our effort and lessons learned in commercializing an innovative infrastructure to support student participation and collaboration and help the instructor manage large or distance classrooms using multiagent system intelligence. The system, called I-MINDS, has a host of intelligent agents for each classroom: a teacher agent ranks and categorizes real-time questions from the students and collects statistics on student participation, a number of group agents that each maintains a collaborative group and facilitate student discussions, and a student agent for each student that profiles a student and finds compatible students to form the student's "buddy group". Our commercialization plan is three-fold: (1) to strengthen our understanding of potential customers, (2) to understand our competitors and alternative products, and (3) to examine and estimate the market potential for I-MINDS. To accomplish the above, we have conducted experiments to further investigate the impact of I-MINDS in actual use, comprehensive research on existing products and technologies, secure legal protection of our technology, plug-and-play I-MINDS for various demonstrations to companies for joint research and development.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence
            Subjects: Multiagent systems

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence
            Subjects: Intelligent agents

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
cooperative learning, distance education, multiagent