AGREEMENT

You are invited to participate in a research study conducted by the DialPort project, consisting of Principal Investigator Dr. Maxine Eskenazi of Carnegie Mellon University and Co-Principal Investigator Dr. David Traum of the University of Southern California, because you are at least 18 years of age, can speak or type into the DialPort portal and are using a Chrome browser with your computer. This study is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Your interaction with the information and/or game applications will generate anonymous text and/or speech data that will be shared with the spoken dialogue research community for research on spoken dialogue systems.

If you volunteer to participate in this study, you will interact with one or more information and/or game applications using either speech or text input. Currently, you may request information about Carnegie Mellon University’s bus routes, play a word-guessing game that will provide you clues to enable you to guess a series of words correctly, ask about the weather and/or request information about restaurants in Cambridge, U.K. You may interact with these applications as long as you like, and terminate whenever you like by saying “goodbye.”

There is no risk in participating in this study other than that associated with the use of a computer.

You may benefit from participating by getting some information or by playing a game. Data collected from your interaction may help advance knowledge in the field of spoken dialogue.

You will not be compensated for your participation.

Only information provided by you through voluntary interaction with our system will be used. The text and audio data collected will be stored on secure servers within the participating institutions indefinitely and used for research purposes. No personal identifiers will be assigned to these files. This anonymous data may be accessed by members of the research team, members of the research community, the National Science Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University’s Institutional Review Board and the University of Southern California’s Human Subjects Protection Programs (HSPP). The results of this research may be made public, shared with participating sites and quoted in professional journals and meetings, but results from this study will only be reported as a group such that no individual respondents can be identified. No identifiable information will be collected or included in any presentations or publications.

Your participation is voluntary. Your decision not to participate will not involve any penalty or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. You may withdraw your consent at any time and discontinue participation without penalty. You are not waiving any legal claims, rights or remedies because of your participation in this research study.

Your alternative is to not participate. You may terminate your interaction with any of the applications at any time.

If you have any questions or concerns about the research, please feel free to contact Dr. Maxine Eskenazi, Principal Investigator dialport-contact@lists.andrew.cmu.edu Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University 6413 Gates Hillman Complex 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412)268-6591 Dr. David Traum, Co-Principal Investigator traum@ict.usc.edu USC Institute for Creative Technologies 12015 Waterfront Dr., Playa Vista, CA 90094 (310)574-5700.

If you have questions, concerns, or complaints about your rights as a research participant or the research in general and are unable to contact the research team, or if you want to talk to someone independent of the research team, please contact either the Office of Research Integrity and Compliance at Carnegie Mellon University, email: irb-review@andrew.cmu.edu; Phone (412) 268-1901 or (412)268-5460; or, the University Park Institutional Review Board (UPIRB), 3720 South Flower Street #301, Los Angeles, CA  90089-0702, (213) 821-5272 or upirb@usc.edu