Supporting Students with a Personal Advisor Gianni Cozzolongo, Berardina De Carolis, Sebastiano Pizzutilo Dipartimento di Informatica – Università di Bari (Italy) {cozzolongo,decarolis,pizzutilo}@di.uniba.it Abstract. Recently, many national and international initiative show an increas- ing interest in promoting distance education interventions by Universities. These initiatives aim at supporting students during their studies providing them with personalized solutions to their problems related not only to the fruition of on-line courses but also to orientation issues. In this paper we present a general architecture of an Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) that has the main aim to assist students by providing personalized suggestions. In particular, the ECA architecture has been conceived in order to run on the student handheld device. The paper discusses the design and technical issues involved in devel- oping this personal agent and the plan for evaluation. 1. Introduction In this paper we present a general architecture of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that has the main aim to assist students by providing personalized suggestions. These suggestions can be related not only to the fruition of on-line courses but also to orientation issues regarding their daily student life. The motivations at the basis of this work come from the directive of the Italian Universities that aims at promoting interventions for improving mentoring and orien- tation services. This directive aims at following students during the entire course of study, giving them personalized suggestions about different topics and helping them to take decisions about their formative process [8]. In particular, taking as a reference the role of an advisor in our Department, his/her main goal consists in assisting and orienting the students focusing on: suggestions about orientation choices, personaliza- tion of the study curricula, removal of “obstacles” during the course of study, identi- fication of appropriate and interesting research fields for the thesis, suggestions on how to make students more participative in their formative process. At the first year, each student is assigned to an advisor, defined among available professors by the Department Council, who follows the students during the entire course of study. However, we noticed that this service was not fully exploited by students and we started to investigate about the reasons related to this phenomenon. In order to assess the real motivations, we made a user study consisting in a questionnaire (150 subjects in total) aiming at understanding which was the user’s expectations about the tutor role and at assessing why students were not using this orientation service. Analyzing the answers to questions about this last issue, it came out that the main reason was related to the difficulty to find the tutor always available when needed (professors