Laboratories of Learning’: Learning to Learn in Co-created Communities of Practice

Autonomous cyber-physical agents play an increasingly large role in our lives. To ensure that they behave in ways aligned with the values of society, we must develop techniques that allow these agents to not only maximize their reward in an environment, but also to learn and follow the implicit constraints of society. We detail a novel approach that uses inverse reinforcement learning to learn a set of unspecified constraints from demonstrations and reinforcement learning to learn to maximize environmental rewards. A contextual bandit-based orchestrator then picks between the two policies: constraint-based and environment reward-based. The contextual bandit orchestrator allows the agent to mix policies in novel ways, taking the best actions from either a reward-maximizing or constrained policy. In addition, the orchestrator is transparent on which policy is being employed at each time step. We test our algorithms using Pac-Man and show that the agent is able to learn to act optimally, act within the demonstrated constraints, and mix these two functions in complex ways.

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The Challenge of Evaluating Virtual Communities of Practice: A Systematic Mapping Study

Interdisciplinary Journal of Information Knowledge and Management ◽

10.28945/4505 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 15 ◽

pp. 039-064

Author(s):

Rogerio Ferreira da Silva ◽

Itana Maria de Souza Gimenes ◽

José Carlos Maldonado

Keyword(s):

Communities Of Practice ◽

Virtual Communities ◽

Evaluation Process ◽

Evaluation Methods ◽

Systematic Mapping Study ◽

Research Gaps ◽

Systematic Mapping ◽

Research Questions ◽

Virtual Communities Of Practice ◽

Selection Of

Aim/Purpose: This paper presents a study of Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP) evaluation methods that aims to identify their current status and impact on knowledge sharing. The purposes of the study are as follows: (i) to identify trends and research gaps in VCoP evaluation methods; and, (ii) to assist researchers to position new research activities in this domain. Background: VCoP have become a popular knowledge sharing mechanism for both individuals and organizations. Their evaluation process is complex; however, it is recognized as an essential means to provide evidences of community effectiveness. Moreover, VCoP have introduced additional features to face to face Communities of Practice (CoP) that need to be taken into account in evaluation processes, such as geographical dispersion. The fact that VCoP rely on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to execute their practices as well as storing artifacts virtually makes more consistent data analysis possible; thus, the evaluation process can apply automatic data gathering and analysis. Methodology: A systematic mapping study, based on five research questions, was carried out in order to analyze existing studies about VCoP evaluation methods and frameworks. The mapping included searching five research databases resulting in the selection of 1,417 papers over which a formal analysis process was applied. This process led to the preliminary selection of 39 primary studies for complete reading. After reading them, we select 28 relevant primary studies from which data was extracted and synthesized to answer the proposed research questions. Contribution: The authors of the primary studies analyzed along this systematic mapping propose a set of methods and strategies for evaluating VCoP, such as frameworks, processes and maturity models. Our main contribution is the identification of some research gaps present in the body of studies, in order to stimulate projects that can improve VCoP evaluation methods and support its important role in social learning. Findings: The systematic mapping led to the conclusion that most of the approaches for VCoP evaluation do not consider the combination of data structured and unstructured metrics. In addition, there is a lack of guidelines to support community operators’ actions based on evaluation metrics.

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Supporting the development of a national constellation of communities of practice in the scholarship of teaching and learning through the use of intelligent agents

10.3115/1150240.1150249 ◽

1999 ◽

Author(s):

Darren Cambridge

Keyword(s):

Communities Of Practice ◽

Intelligent Agents ◽

Teaching And Learning ◽

Scholarship Of Teaching

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