Media Contact:
Jim Ong
650.931.2710

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

U. S. AIR FORCE AWARDS CONTRACT TO STOTTLER HENKE FOR
INTERNET-BASED INTELLIGENT TRAINING AND AUTHORING SYSTEMS

 SAN MATEO, CA, Mar. 31, 1999 –- Stottler Henke Associates, Inc. today announced the award of a two year $750,000 Phase II contract with the U.S. Air Force to develop an Internet-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) Authoring and Delivery environment. The new system will enable the Air Force to create intelligent, interoperable, simulation-based training modules which the system will select, adapt, and deliver automatically to meet the individual training needs of each student.

Stottler Henke will develop for the Air Force a distributed environment to support the authoring, storage, automated selection, and network delivery of intelligent, simulation-based training modules. An innovative, general-purpose authoring tool will enable instructors to parameterize the content, training strategy, and presentation style of each training module so it can adapt itself to support diverse learning objectives, backgrounds, and expertise levels of different students. The network of cooperative servers will store many, independently-authored training modules which teach diverse but related topics.

The design of the Stottler Henke’s distributed training environment borrows powerful ideas from the World Wide Web. Many different individuals and organizations develop and maintain millions of web pages independently. However, their interconnection via hyperlinks enables people to navigate from page to page to find relevant information quickly and easily. In a similar way, each training module will use conventional and artificial intelligence-based evaluation techniques to identify concepts the student does not understand based on the student’s actions.  If those concepts are not taught by the training module, the module will search for other modules on the Internet which teach these topics, adapt the modules dynamically to meet the student’s individual needs, and transfer the modules over the Internet for just-in-time delivery to the student.

“Just as the linking of web pages makes the Web appear as a single, gigantic information resource, interoperability of training modules accessed over the Internet will enable independent and parallel development of many training modules to create a single, gigantic, ubiquitous training resource,” says Dr. Sowmya Ramachandran, the project’s principal investigator.  “This idea is a completely new paradigm and could revolutionize training,” continues Dr. Ramachandran.

Founded in 1988, Stottler Henke Associates, Inc. applies artificial intelligence and other advanced software technologies to solve problems that defy solution using traditional approaches. The company delivers intelligent software solutions for education and training, planning and scheduling, knowledge management and discovery, decision support, and software development. Stottler Henke’s clients include manufacturers, retailers, educational media companies and government agencies.   Web: https://www.stottlerhenke.com.