Abstract
We propose an application of socially intelligent agents (SIAs) for enhancing e-Learning. SIAs are software agents which manifest social intelligence. Although there are many types of social intelligence, we focus on social intelligence for providing emotional support. By applying this type of social intelligence, our SIAs are able to simulate human social behavior. We developed a software platform for applications of SIAs. We demonstrate how we created the SIAs and describe the conceptual architecture of our software platform. We also show the mechanism for generating the agents' social behavior, which makes our software platform unique. According to the media equation theory, we expect SIAs to benefit users. To examine the effects of SIAs, we designed and implemented an applications for e-Learning. We provide explanation about how SIAs function in this application and discuss further implications of social intelligence.
