My name is Chengkai Li, and I am asking you to participate in a UT Arlington research study titled “Orion: A Visual Query Formulation System for Knowledge Graphs”. This research study is about evaluating a system that helps visually formulate a query. The system is hosted in a website where it provides necessary tools to draw a query on a given space. The research study result will help our team evaluate the system. You can choose to participate in this research study if you are at least 18 years old and a junior, senior or graduate student of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UT Arlington, under the condition that you never participated in this study before and you are not a member of the IDIR lab.

Reasons why you might want to participate in this study include:

1. The opportunity to contribute to a less-explored research area that we believe is beneficial to a specific user group and the database community as a whole.
2. An experience to play the role of a stakeholder in the development of a novel software tool.

But you might not want to participate if you do not feel comfortable with activities you are expected to perform (see details below) or you do not have the time. Your decision about whether to participate is entirely up to you. If you decide not to be in the study, there will not be any punishment or penalty; whatever your choice, there will be no impact on any benefits or services that you would normally receive. Even if you choose to begin the study, you can also change your mind and quit at any time without any consequences.

If you decide to participate in this research study, the list of activities that I will ask you to complete for the research are:

1. Read through this informed consent and talk with the research team to make sure that any questions you may have are answered; then make your choice about whether to participate.
2. If you agree to participate, you will be seated in a computer lab and will be assigned to a computer.
3. You will be asked to watch a video tutorial that describes the system you will be using.
4. You will be given five minutes to independently practice the system.
5. You will be given 6 graph query formulation tasks to solve using the system. The tasks will be chosen from a pool of 15 tasks, where you will get to solve 2 (chosen from 5) tasks from each difficulty (easy, medium, hard) level. The task will be in the form of natural language question, which you will convert to a graph query using the graph drawing tool provided by our system. The success of task completion will be assessed by the overlap of your solution with our expected solution as well as measuring the time you spent to solve the task. After solving each task, you will be asked to fill out a questionnaire to measure their experience of solving this task. Once all tasks are finished, you will be asked to fill out a final questionnaire to specify your name, UTA email, department, education level and share overall experience of using the system.

It should take about 75 minutes. Although you probably will not experience any personal benefits from participating, the study activities are not expected to pose any additional risks beyond those that you would normally experience in your regular everyday life or during routine medical / psychological visits.

You will receive a compensation of a $20 to $25 gift card. To get the additional reward (a gift card higher than $20) you need to listen the instructions attentively, stay focused during the user study and accomplish the tasks correctly within the given time. We will make our best effort to pay you within two weeks after use study. There are no alternative options to this research project. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) considers all payments made to research subjects to be taxable income; this may require additional information to be collected from you for tax purposes, such as your social security number.

There can be risk of undue influence because you are recruited by a professor. Since there is an authority difference between the two parties, it is possible that you might feel compelled to participate in the research against your best interests. You may worry about your grades, future research opportunities, etc., if you decline. We want to assure you that the decision to participate or not participate will not influence your grades or future research opportunities.

The research team is committed to protecting your rights and privacy as a research subject. We may publish or present the results, but your name will not be used. While absolute confidentiality cannot be guaranteed, the research team will make every effort to protect the confidentiality of your records as described here and to the extent permitted by law. If the data is lost or stolen, you may feel the risk to be exposed as a research subject in a usability study. To minimize this risk, we are storing the data on UTA-sanctioned cloud storage (OneDrive) and will limit its access to protocol personnel only. If you have questions about the study, you can contact me at cli@uta.edu. For questions about your rights or to report complaints, contact the UTA Research Office at 817-272-3723 or regulatoryservices@uta.edu.

Thank you for participating in user study!