Keynote2: Intercultural collaboration as a multi-agent system

Abstract

In 2006, we launched the Language Grid project to realize a distributed language service infrastructure on the Internet. Using the Language Grid, we worked with a nongovernmental organization since 2011 to support knowledge communications between agricultural experts in Japan and farmers in Vietnam via their children. We observed that a large community emerged to efficiently utilize nonmature machine translation technologies. During this experience, by facing different types of difficulties, we gradually came to understand the nature of intercultural collaboration. Problems are wicked and not easily defined because of their nested and open networked origin. Fortunately, multiagent technologies can be applied to model stakeholders and simulate intercultural collaboration so as to predict the difficulties and to prepare a better support systems. In this talk, we provide a brief history of the research and practice as regards intercultural collaboration, which can be seen as a human-aware research on multi-agent system.