The Effects of Robot Voices and Appearances on Users\u27 Emotion Recognition and Subjective Perception

As the influence of social robots in people\u27s daily lives grows, research on understanding people\u27s perception of robots including sociability, trust, acceptance, and preference becomes more pervasive. Research has considered visual, vocal, or tactile cues to express robots\u27 emotions, whereas little research has provided a holistic view in examining the interactions among different factors influencing emotion perception. We investigated multiple facets of user perception on robots during a conversational task by varying the robots\u27 voice types, appearances, and emotions. In our experiment, 20 participants interacted with two robots having four different voice types. While participants were reading fairy tales to the robot, the robot gave vocal feedback with seven emotions and the participants evaluated the robot\u27s profiles through post surveys. The results indicate that (1) the accuracy of emotion perception differed depending on presented emotions, (2) a regular human voice showed higher user preferences and naturalness, (3) but a characterized voice was more appropriate for expressing emotions with significantly higher accuracy in emotion perception, and (4) participants showed significantly higher emotion recognition accuracy with the animal robot than the humanoid robot. A follow-up study (N=10) with voice-only conditions confirmed that the importance of embodiment. The results from this study could provide the guidelines needed to design social robots that consider emotional aspects in conversations between robots and users

Probing Grand Unified Theories with Cosmic Ray, Gamma-Ray and Neutrino Astrophysics

We explore scenarios where the highest energy cosmic rays are produced by new particle physics near the grand unification scale. Using detailed numerical simulations of extragalactic nucleon, gamma-ray, and neutrino propagation, we show the existence of an interesting parameter range for which such scenarios may explain part of the data and are consistent with all observational constraints. A combination of proposed observatories for ultra-high energy cosmic rays, neutrino telescopes of a few kilometer scale, and gamma-ray astrophysics instruments should be able to test these scenarios. In particular, for neutrino masses in the eV range, exclusive neutrino decay modes of superheavy particles can give rise to neutrino fluxes comparable to those predicted in models of active galactic nuclei.Comment: 15 latex pages, 5 postscript figures included, uses revtex.sty and psfig.sty. Submitted to Physical Review

Simple odd number frequency divider with 50% duty cycle

A simple odd number frequency divider with 50% duty cycle is presented. The odd number frequency divider consists of a general odd number counter and the proposed duty cycle trimming circuit. The duty cycle trimming circuit can output 50% duty cycle with only additional six transistors. A prototype divide-by-5 circuit with 50% duty cycle was implemented for a 500-Mb/s similar to 5.6-Gb/s 1:10 CDR/DEMUX IC in a 0.13 mu m 1P8M CMOS process.open0