My research mission throughout my 27 years in higher education has been focused on investigating the reemergence of phenomena in multiagent systems. Using theories on human learning from Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Science in the constructivist vein, I have been formalizing learning approaches, applying those theories in programs for software and robotic agents, and observing phenomena emerging though interactions between the homogenous or heterogenous models such as environment representation, emergence of language, and the dynamics of special interest groups. The main premise of the approach is that humans enter the world as a blank slate, and learn to expect behaviors though their experiences in interacting with the world and the others around them and establish expectancies relevant to their active drives. The mathematical framework within these models are built relies on fuzzy measures, which are a generalization of probability and possibility measures. This research has had implications on my work in building intelligent tutoring systems in which software agents monitor human learner’s performance and adjust the process, learning theories in general, and organizing instruction in the online classroom.

In 2019, major results emerged from my collaboration with a product design and development team in a competency-based online institution of higher learning. We investigated the impact of the manifest and latent coding in assessment prompts and rubrics on learner’s success in performance assessment and used the results and the data collected from the evaluation of performance assessments to provide a framework for writing effective assessment prompts and rubrics. This work was presented at the 2019 Assessment Institute at Indianapolis and the Drexel Assessment Conference.

Most of my 13 books and 300+ articles have resulted from symbioses and intersection of research interests with colleagues from a variety of disciplines, from mechanical engineering, psychology, anthropology, to education. If this write-up triggered interest in any of its readers, please reach out and let’s see where our own intersections of interests reside.