Martin Beer is a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Computing and the Communications and
Computing Research Centre of Sheffield Hallam University. His research interests include the use of
agents to assist learners in collaborative online learning environments and in the management of care
for the elderly and others, such as autism sufferers, developing improved multilingual support within
relational database systems, improved design techniques for mobile applications and the development of
personalisation services within recommender systems for local government and other public services.
He has organised workshops considering the educational issues of multi-agent systems at AAMAS at
Budapest in 2009 and AAMAS at Toronto in 2010. He is one of the organisers of a similar workshop
at AAMAS at Taipai in 2011. He is a Chartered Engineer, Chartered Scientist and Fellow of the British
Computer Society.
Maria Fasli is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the
University of Essex. She obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2000. Her current research interests
lie in agents and their theoretical foundations and practical applications such as electronic markets, web
service discovery and composition, web search and dynamic user profiles. She has published papers on
logics for reasoning agents, formal models of multi-agent systems, trading agents and platforms, trust,
and web search assistants. She is the author of “Agent Technology for E-commerce” (John Wiley and
Sons, 2007). Her interests extend to technology-enhanced learning and she was also awarded a National
Teaching Fellowship for her innovative approaches to learning and teaching.
Debbie Richards is currently an Associate Professor in the Computing Department at Macquarie
University in Sydney, Australia. She has been interested in expertise and knowledge from a theoretical
and practical point of view since the early 80s. This was initially inspired by her work in the ICT industry
with experts and explored further in her Masters and PhD theses, following completion of a Bachelor
of Business. Virtual worlds provide much potential for educating and training people using safe environments with greater ecological validity than a laboratory or classroom setting. Agent-based systems
provide the intelligence needed to achieve this experience. Currently she is working, with Meredith,
on developing a Multi-User Virtual Environment for science inquiry in Australian secondary schools.
Our key challenge is creating intelligent animals and avatars to allow students to observe and interact
with advanced behaviours such as predator-prey and flocking. The world is being built using Unity3D,
chosen as a result of the study conducted by Arda.