Download Cyber-learning in cyberworlds

1. Project Title: Cyber-learning in Cyber worlds
Prospective advisors: Primary advisor: A/P Alexei Sourin (SCE), Co-advisor: Paul Gagnon (CED)
Project Description:
Cyber-learning is an important and vital part of university education. However, when more and more
information is provided electronically, it often results in disorientation and exhaust of the students. The
students become more and more interested in personalized education where, ideally, their personal
mentors would be able to help with solving any problem. Creating and using educational cyberworlds
with cyber-instructors or virtual humans may become an excellent teaching tool implementing personal
mentoring of students at affordable cost. Design and implementation of cyber-instructors requires the
following research and development work to be done:
To study the existing educational cyberworlds and intelligent talking agents (chatbots, virtual humans).
It assumes studying graphics and behavioral models of intelligent agents, including 2D and 3D body and
head visualization, face expressions, talking head models, text-to-speech generation, speech-related
movements, complex patterns of movements, human behaviour modelling, emotional reactions,
cognitive functions avatar's minds, including general knowledge bases and extracting knowledge from
data.
To propose a concept of cyber-education where virtual instructors/virtual humans will augment and
even replace real instructors. Cyber-learning with cyber-instructors must incorporate elements of fun
and games.
The proposed concepts can be implemented within a shared virtual world or as a stand-alone version.
The candidate has to design and implement cyber-instructors, which will be able to maintain
conversation with the students as well as offer different educational services. There must be designed
and developed interactive software tools with user-friendly interfaces allowing the lecturers to add
content to the "brains" of the cyber-instructors.
Requirements for the candidate:
Advance programming skills (C, C++, Java) and background in artificial intelligence (e.g. AIML)
Experience in computer graphics (undergraduate course at least, former projects will be an advantage)
Experience in web (Java Script, Perl, etc.) and 3D web (VRML, X3D, AW RWX, SL scripts) programming
will be further advantage.
The detailed topic will be defined after discussing it with the applicant.