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We are inviting you to consider participating in a research study conducted at the Vanderbilt Institute for Software Integrated Systems. Your participation is entirely voluntary. This study analyzes the efficacy of the explanations produced by decision-making algorithms — specifically, the explanations for an AI system that plans and revises school-bus routes and schedules. Familiarity with these kinds of planning algorithms is not required to participate.

While participating, you will interact with a chatbot. Please refrain from providing any sensitive or personal information when interacting with the chatbot. Note: the system-generated decisions are based on simulated, non-personalized scenarios and do not reflect real-world consequences.

Should you decide to participate, you will act as a school-transportation dispatcher and complete the following:

• Review a set of school-bus scheduling scenarios — a normal morning run, a mid-service bus breakdown, and a route disruption.
• For each scenario, you will see the system's computed schedule or replan, and you may ask the AI questions about it.
• For each question, three anonymized answers are shown side by side; you rate them on clarity, usefulness, and trustworthiness. There are no right or wrong answers — we are evaluating the explanations, not you.
• Your participation is expected to take approximately 25–35 minutes.

For the best experience, we recommend a desktop or laptop computer. Some interactive elements (the map and the side-by-side answer panels) may not function properly on mobile or tablet devices.

All efforts, within reason, will be made to keep your information confidential. Your ratings, questions, response times, and comments are recorded for research. Data is stored without personal identifiers and is reported only in aggregate; no personal information or identifier (e.g., name, gender) will be shared or used to identify you.

If you have any questions about this research study, please contact Guocheng He at guocheng.he@vanderbilt.edu, Vakul Nath at vakul.nath@vanderbilt.edu, Abhishek Dubey at abhishek.dubey@vanderbilt.edu, and Meiyi Ma at meiyi.ma@vanderbilt.edu.

Please confirm each of the following to begin. If you get disconnected, you can resume this session by returning and signing in the same way.

We kindly ask you to self-report your background. These questions are used only to describe our participant pool; your responses will not be linked to your ratings. All questions are required.