Multi-Agent Systems for Education and Interactive Entertainment: Design, Use and Experience presents readers with a rich collection of ideas from researchers who are exploring the complex tradeoffs that must be made in designing agent systems for education and interactive entertainment. This book aims to provide a mixture of relevant theoretical and practical understanding of the use of multi-agent systems in educational and entertainment research, together with practical examples of the use of such systems in real application scenarios.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 2008 Pacific Rim Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, PKAW 2008, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in December 2008 as part of 10th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI 2008.

The 20 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions and went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on machine learning and data mining, incremental knowledge acquisition, web-based techniques and applications, as well as domain specific knowledge acquisition methods and applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 2006 Pacific Rim Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, PKAW 2006, held in Guilin, China in August 2006 as part of 9th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI 2006.

The 21 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 4 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology and knowledge acquisition, algorithm approaches to knowledge acquisition, incremental knowledge acquisition and RDR, knowledge acquisition and applications, as well as machine learning and data mining.

The study reported in this paper is an ongoing effort. We reported a preliminary analysis of the data in the paper. The current experiments varied the subjects to c- duct online group learning activities by the communication media such as email and threaded discussion. Although, we could have easily learned the impact of mobile devices in learning if we divided the subjects to use different hardware such as p- sonal computers, personal digital assistant, or mobile phones, we believe our findings will still be able to provide useful insights on the difficulties that the mobile learners will face in solving problems as a group. Our analysis result will also provide ba- line information on whether the traits of the successful or failed online groups are applicable to the mobile learners. For example, we expect the SMS will be a better medium to overcome the major problem of instant communication or the rapid propagation of the information as the mobile phones have built-in mechanism to remind the users of the incoming new messages and also the mobile phone users are expected to be interrupted for the incoming messages. However, we need further investigation of other problems, which hinder the optimum online group work. For example, 'accuracy of the transferred information' was identified as one of the pr- lems of using emails as the communication medium. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or SMS are more apt to deliver shorter messages than the typical emails.

Deeply rooted in Appalachia, "Hills of Home" offers a rich literary patchwork of reflection, memoir, and humor. The story opens in the 1950s in the remote community of Munday in Wirt County, West Virginia. Though comprised of a mosaic of individual stories, the compilation reads like a novel, and is characterized uniquely with the author's personal diary entries and a sailor's letters home.

"Hills of Home" is filled with light-hearted adventures, coming-of-age romances, pie socials, county fairs, older brother pranks, frog gigging, chicken canning, persimmon picking, porch sitting, and reunion going. Harsh winter survivals, personal family struggles, and humorous folklore, which have been handed down through generations, also grace the pages.

In "Hills of Home," readers will discover that mountaineers have pride in their heritage as well as the natural resources of their state. They will discover people who are fiercely independent, hardworking, have a love for family, and a keen sense of loyalty to neighbors. Most of all, readers will find gracious friends, families, and neighbors who help one another in times of need, a quality which has proved sufficient to preserve their way of life in the hills.