Sorry, I forgot to send my reply to Georg J. Anker to the list...

----- Original Message ----- From: "Guy Rinchart" <guy.rinchart2(a)skynet.be> To: "Georg J. Anker" <georg.j.anker(a)uibk.ac.at> Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2005 2:09 AM Subject: Re: Prolog based e-Learning expert system

Hello,

1. My current work concerning e-learing

I am in a Belgian early retirement scheme after a 30-year career with Alcatel Bell, where I spent about 20 years of this career at the BEC (Bell Education Center) now called the AUA (Alcatel University Antwerp). I was not satisfied with the then AU (Alcatel University headquarters) policy of developing e-learning courses based on existing classroom courses by converting them to HTML and adding a few multiple choice questions. They wanted "content" and were not willing to spend some research on how to best develop e-learning and spent a lot of money on an e-learning administration system that mainly controlled access to the courses. Since my experience as a 'teacher' ("learning facilitator") learned me that people learn best by experiencing things themselves, not by reading lots of stuff on a screen and falling asleep, I wanted to develop a demo of a program that enables "Investigative e-learning" by providing a simulation of some system and enabling the students to perform experiments on it to experience themselves how the system works.

This private project resulted in the "IP Analyzer", a simulation of the IP layer in an internet. It enables to learn how to configure a network of routers and hosts by doing it and testing the results and to send a text through the IP layer and observing how the text can be damaged due to the loss of datagrams or their out-of-sequence arrival. Alcatel University was not interested in this project because of the cost to develop such simulations (5 man-months in the case of the IP Analyzer for a programmer already familiar with Java) and the lack of funds. A few months later Alcatel Bell layed off 1300 people, mostly via an early retirement scheme. I then continued to work on the IP Analyzer by providing versions in Dutch and French.

You can experiment yourself with the IP Analyzer (it's a Java Applet) via my site:

http://users.skynet.be/groep-bastin/theWILL/

I recommend to download the binaries and run the Applet with your browser from your local disk, because the users.skynet.be server can sometimes be rather slow.

2. My current plans for the future concerning e-learning

I am currently planning to develop a system to manage "Investigative e-learning" and to allow the student to use any device that implements at least the MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) Java-based standard for interactive digital television (see http://www.mhp.org/), because this standard covers video streaming and because such devices will become cheap in the future. Such a system could use an expert system. As a demo, I would like to develop an "Investigative e-learning" module for some aspects of Genetics controlled by the expert system (I became interested in Genetics while briefly studying Psychology at the University of Leuven and getting some courses from Prof. J-P Cassiman, an authority on the subject).

3. Some remarks on expert systems and 'intelligence'

Being also an amateur philosopher, I want first to present a definition of intelligence that I took from an interesting introduction to artificial intelligence:

See http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/What%20i...

"What is Intelligence?

Quite simple human behaviour can be intelligent yet quite complex behaviour performed by insects is unintelligent. What is the difference? Consider the behaviour of the digger wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus. When the female wasp brings food to her burrow, she deposits it on the threshold, goes inside the burrow to check for intruders, and then if the coast is clear carries in the food. The unintelligent nature of the wasp's behaviour is revealed if the watching experimenter moves the food a few inches while the wasp is inside the burrow checking. On emerging, the wasp repeats the whole procedure: she carries the food to the threshold once again, goes in to look around, and emerges. She can be made to repeat this cycle of behaviour upwards of forty times in succession. Intelligence--conspicuously absent in the case of Sphex--is the ability to adapt one's behaviour to fit new circumstances. Mainstream thinking in psychology regards human intelligence not as a single ability or cognitive process but rather as an array of separate components. Research in AI has focussed chiefly on the following components of intelligence: learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and language-understanding."

A 'classical' expert system will always react in the same way to the same sequence of events after a 'boot' from the same initial state. Such a system would not be 'intelligent' according to the definition above, since it cannot handle circumstances that would not have been anticipated by the programmers that write the rules defining the behaviour (no 'online' modification of the rules). The main advantage of a 'classical' expert system is the automatic truth maintenance that makes programming it easier by automatically and recursively checking the validity of the previously made deductions while using a rule (nonmonotic system).

A 'classical' expert system might nevertheless be useful when we would have a set of "types of students" and try to determine to which type the student we are 'managing' the learning for belongs. The way we 'manage' that student's learning could then be adapted to his/her 'type' of learner by using the expertise on human learning.

Kind rergards,

Ing Guy Rinchart e-mail: guy.rinchart2(a)skynet.be Web: http://users.skynet.be/groep-bastin/theWILL/

----- Original Message ----- From: "Georg J. Anker" <georg.j.anker(a)uibk.ac.at> To: <ciao-users(a)clip.dia.fi.upm.es> Sent: Friday, October 14, 2005 7:05 PM Subject: Prolog based e-Learning expert system

...

Dear colleagues,

I wonder if there are people on this list who are interested in a prolog / ciao based project to develop a hybrid e-learning / expert system. I have vast experience in e-learning systems and I think it is time now to go one step further and add some "intelligence" to such a system.

If you are interested (and have some time available ...), please drop me a note. This might also evolve in a nice EU project proposal.

Georg Anker University of Innsbruck New Media and Lerning Technology Unit

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