AMPLIA: A Probabilistic Learning Environment

This paper introduces AMPLIA, an intelligent learning environment employed as a resource in medical students' training. The development of AMPLIA raised several research topics, due to the convergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Learning Environments. The core topics are: probabilistic diagnostic learning in the medical area, application of teaching strategies based on Pedagogical Negotiation (PN), construction of cognitive student models with probabilistic beliefs, and application of interoperability methods for pedagogical agents, and tutoring systems integration. An important aspect of AMPLIA is the utilization of PN as the main form of interaction. The impact of this approach on the system dynamics and on the student's learning is presented in detail. Considering the importance of cooperative work during the learning process, we describe how AMPLIA is used to enable cooperation. The description is based on experiments carried out with AMPLIA and its users. The main results of these experiments are reported as well.