Forming and scaffolding human coalitions with a multi-agent framework

ABSTRACT

With the advancement of teleconferencing technologies, human users are collaborating online more than ever today. To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of online human coalitions, one needs to support and facilitate collaborations among human users who may or may not know of each other well and of how to work well together as a team or in a team. Here we propose the Integrated Human Coalition Formation and Scaffolding (iHUCOFS) framework. This multiagent framework considers the roles of an agent as both an advisor and a representative to a human user, the tradeoffs between forming and scaffolding human coalitions, and how scaffolding could impact human behaviors for future coalitions. Based on the axioms and design principles of iHUCOFS, we have developed VALCAM---an iterative auction based coalition formation algorithm. To investigate the feasibility and impact of VALCAM, we have conducted an experiment in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment and obtained promising results.

REFERENCES

• 1: Susan Bull , Jim E. Greer , Gordon I. McCalla , Lori Kettel , Jeff Bowes, User Modelling in I-Help: What, Why, When and How, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on User Modeling 2001, p.117-126, July 13-17, 2001
• 2: Constantino-González, M. A. and Suthers, D. D., Coaching Collaboration by Comparing Solutions and Tracking Participation. In Proc. EURO-CSCL, 2001, Maastricht, the Netherlands, 704--705.
• 3: Khandaker, N., Soh, L-K. and Jiang, H. Student learning and team formation in a structured CSCL environment. In Proc. ICCE, 2006, Beijing, China, 185--192.
• 4: Liu, X., Zhang, X., Al-Jaroodi, J., Vemuri, P., Jiang, H. and Soh, L.-K. I-MINDS: An Application of Multiagent System Intelligence to On-Line Education. In Proc. IEEE-SMC, 2003, Washington, D. C., 4864--4871.
• 5: Gerhard Weiss, Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000
• 6: Soh, L-K., Khandaker, N. and Jiang, H. Multiagent Coalition Formation for Computer-supported Cooperative Learning. In Proc. IAAI, 2006, Boston, MA, 1844--1851.
• 7: Leen-Kiat Soh , Nobel Khandaker , Xuliu Liu , Hong Jiang, A computer-supported cooperative learning system with multiagent intelligence, Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, May 08-12, 2006, Hakodate, Japan [doi>10.1145/1160633.1160933]
• 8: Soh, L-K., Khandaker, N., Liu X. and Jiang, H. Computer-Supported Structured Cooperative Learning. In Proc. ICCE, 2005, Singapore, Singapore, 428--435.

INDEX TERMS

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

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
formation, human coalition, multiagent support, scaffolding