The commitment of the Human-Computer Learning Foundation is to search
for computer-oriented accelerators of trainability and self-trainability,
with a particular focus on distance-learning whereby overseas students can
improve their skills in spoken English. Various excellent "teach yourself
English" commercial packages are already distributed world-wide,, for
example by the Language Learning Division of the Oxford University Press,
UK. But these have so far been hampered by limited means to enable students
to practise their English conversation. The Foundation's currrent research
is aimed at filling this gap. Success will illustrate in an explicit
and useful form the new software regimes which the Foundation was formed to
develop, namely those in which human and computer agents incrementally learn
from each other through mutual interaction.
Rupert Macnee, Jean Hayes Michie, and
Donald Michie formed the Human-Computer Learning Foundation in 1994.
The following year HCLF was accepted by the UK Charity Commission as registered charity no.
1045098. HCLF is dedicated to the advancement of public education in the understanding and use
of human-computer learning and to the widest possible dissemination of the results.