HURAA

HURAA Architecture:

• Multi-media interface
• Dialog Advancer Networks
• Latent Semantic Analysis
• Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM).
• Learning Trajectories:
  • Historical Overview
  • Lessons
  • Explore Issues
  • Explore Cases
  • Making a Decision
  • Query Documents

The information in the HURAA learning trajectories is structured to provide guidance about current policies to high-ranking military officials, researchers, and civilian members of IRBs who review research protocols involving human subjects in studies sponsored by the Department of Defense (DoD). The content in HURAA is derived from numerous federal agency documents and regulations and from other military, scientific, and historical sources. Some of the sources are provided below.

• The Common Rule (45 CFR 46; 32 CFR 219). These are the ethical principles declared by the National Institutes of Health and directly adopted by the Department of Defense.
• Department of Defense Directive 3216.2. These are the ethical principles that protect human subjects in defense research that was adopted by the Department of Defense in 1983. The directives address the military as a vulnerable population, implicit coercion, command influence, and classified research.
• Relevant regulations from the various branches (i.e., Air Force Instruction 40-402; Army Regulation 70-25; Secretary of Navy Instruction 3900.39B). Some branches of the military have distinctive regulations that are not adopted by the other branches.
• The Belmont Report, plus the "Seven Critical Issues" that instantiate the Belmont Principles. Each institution that conducts federally funded research must adhere to the three principles of the Belmont Report: Beneficence, justice, and respect for persons. These principles are implemented more specifically by scrutinizing seven critical issues that apply to any case: Social and scientific value, accepted scientific principles, fair subject selection, informed consent, minimizing risks and maximizing benefits, independent review, and respect for subjects. These Seven Critical Issues are identified and defined by Emmanual, Wendler, and Grady (2000).
• Institutional Review Board (IRB) Guidebook. An IRB is a local panel of individuals who review and approve human subjects protocols. This document provides the guidelines for the IRB review process.
• Nuremberg Code. This is the first internationally recognized code of research ethics. It was written in 1946 at the Nuremberg trial, when 23 Nazi physicians were tried for research atrocities on prisoners.

HURAA is designed to facilitate both learning and information retrieval. The system incorporates sophisticated pedagogical techniques that have been implemented in intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) during the last two decades. Specifically, HURAA features case-based reasoning, explanation-based reasoning, inquiry learning, and animated conversational agents. Most of these ITS capabilities are designed to promote deep learning, rather than mere shallow learning.

The information retrieval facilities in HURAA are designed to access information in a large space of documents. HURAA has the conventional methods of information retrieval such as hypertext and glossaries, but HURAA also has state-of-the-art information retrieval mechanisms. These mechanisms include a Point&Query facility and a natural language Query Module. The Point&Query facility provides answers to context-sensitive Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and the Query Module allows users to type in questions or descriptions in English. The Query Module responds to the users input by accessing relevant documents identified through the use of recently developed techniques in computational linguistics.