This paper presents initial attempts to combine a humanoid robot with the teachable agent approach. Several design choices are discussed, including the decision to use a robot instead of a virtual agent and which behaviours to implement in the robot. A pilot study explored how the interaction with a robot seemed to influence children’s engagement as well as their attribution of mental states to a robot and to a virtual agent. Eight children participated and the interaction was measured via an observational protocol and a conversational interview. A main outcome was large individual differences between the children’s interaction with the robot compared to the virtual agent.

To overcome the shortcomings of simple metrics for evaluating player performance, recent works have introduced more advanced metrics that take into account the context of the players’ actions and perform look-ahead. However, as ice hockey is a team sport, knowing about individual ratings is not enough and coaches want to identify players that play particularly well together. In this paper we therefore extend earlier work for evaluating the performance of players to the related problem of evaluating the performance of player pairs. We experiment with data from seven NHL seasons, discuss the top pairs, and present analyses and insights based on both the absolute and relative ice time together.

A fundamental problem in artificial intelligence is how to organize and coordinate agents to improve their performance and skills. In this paper, we consider simultaneously generating coalitions of agents and assigning the coalitions to independent tasks, and present an anytime algorithm for the simultaneous coalition structure generation and assignment problem. This optimization problem has many real-world applications, including forming goal-oriented teams of agents. To evaluate the algorithm’s performance, we extend established methods for synthetic problem set generation, and benchmark the algorithm against CPLEX using randomized data sets of varying distribution and complexity. We also apply the algorithm to solve the problem of assigning agents to regions in a major commercial strategy game, and show that the algorithm can be utilized in game-playing to coordinate smaller sets of agents in real-time.