vBroker: Artificial Agents Helping to Stock Up on Knowledge

摘要

Hungary, a former socialist country, has a thriving financial market (Budapest Stock Exchange, BSE) 15 years after the systems change. Yet, the general public's knowledge about the BSE, or about stock markets in general, is very limited and most small investors are only aware of a single investment option: the savings account. The vBroker project (funded by the Hungarian Financial Supervisory Authority) aimed at familiarizing the Hungarian public with the workings of the stock market. It consisted of a combination of three elements: an e-learning portal with material on financial markets, an intelligent training assistant agent (an intelligent chatter robot connected to a specialized knowledge base) and a multi-agent based simulated stock market, packaged as an online investment game. This paper describes the vBroker portal, gives an overview of its main modules, and discusses its embodied communicational agent and its artificial stock market in more detail.