Innovative Education using Virtual Worlds

Austin Tate & Ai Austin

http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~ai/

AIAI, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh
Appleton Tower, Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9LE, UK


Second Life and other emerging massive on-line persistent 3-D virtual
world environments are set to follow the 2-D web as an essential
element of future computing systems.

Our speaker, Austin Tate, Director of the Artificial Intelligent
Applications Institute in the School of Informatics at the University
of Edinburgh, and his virtual worlds counterpart 'Ai Austin', will
discuss current educational activity in Second Life and a number of
other virtual environments.

The talk will describe work at the Virtual University of Edinburgh -
Vue - and what some University projects are doing in the Vue regions
in Second Life. He will explore how virtual environments are being
used for research, collaboration and teamwork.



Biography:

Prof. Austin Tate holds the Chair in Knowledge-Based Systems at the
University of Edinburgh and is the Director of the Artificial
Intelligence Applications Institute at the University which transfers
the technologies and methods of artificial intelligence and knowledge
systems into commercial, governmental and academic applications
throughout the world. He holds degrees in Computer Studies (B.A.
Lancaster, 1972) and Machine Intelligence (Ph.D. Edinburgh, 1975). He
is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland's National
Academy), and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence amongst other honours. He is a professionally
Chartered Engineer.

His internationally sponsored research work is focused on
collaboration and emergency response and involves advanced knowledge
and planning technologies, and collaborative systems especially using
virtual worlds. He leads the Virtual University of Edinburgh, Vue, a
virtual educational and research institute bringing together those
interested in the use of virtual worlds for teaching, research and
outreach - http://vue.ed.ac.uk


Image (c) 2008, Austin Tate - permission to use this is granted:
     http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~ai/img/Ai-and-Austin-2.jpg

Other resolution images available at:
     http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~ai/img/