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One of the established strengths of human tutors is
their ability to recognise and adapt to the emotions
of students. This is a skill that has traditionally
been lacking from Intelligent Tutoring Systems
(ITSs); despite their ability to intelligently model
and adapt to aspects of the student s cognitive
state, ITSs are generally completely unable to detect
or adapt to aspects of the student s affective state.

In response to this shortcoming, this book explores
the exciting development of an emotion-sensitive
ITS. With the empathy of effective human tutors as
our blueprint, we investigate how an artificial tutor
should adapt to the affective state of students. To
inform the tutor s adaptation to student affect, a
novel method for student modelling and
emotion-sensitive tutoring strategies has been
developed using a fuzzy, case-based reasoning
approach. As a validation of the feasibility of an
emotion-sensitive tutoring system, we implement and
test our method in an Affective Tutoring System (ATS)
for counting and addition, Easy with Eve, featuring
an empathetic animated pedagogical agent, Eve.

An affect-sensitive intelligent tutor: Adapting to student emotions based on human empathy