In this paper we explore how simple auditory/ verbal features of the spoken language, such as voice characteristics (pitch) and language cues (empathy/humor expression) influence the quality of interaction with a social robot receptionist. For our experiment two robot characters were created: Olivia, the more extrovert, exuberant, and humorous robot with a higher voice pitch and Cynthia, the more introvert, calmer and more serious robot with a lower voice pitch. Our results showed that the voice pitch seemed to have a strong influence on the way users rated the overall interaction quality, as well as the robot's appeal and overall enjoyment. Further, the humor appeared to improve the users' perception of task enjoyment, robot personality and speaking style while the empathy showed effects on the way users evaluated the robot's receptive behavior and the interaction ease. With our study, we would like to stress in particular the importance of voice pitch in human robot interaction and to encourage further research on this topic.

A B S T R A C TDuring infectious disease outbreaks, the centers for disease control need to monitor particular areas. Considerable effort has been invested in the development of portable, user-friendly, and cost-effective systems for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics, which could also create an Internet of Things (IoT) for healthcare via a global network. However, at present IoT based on a functional POC instrument is not available. Here we show a fast, user-friendly, and affordable IoT system based on a miniaturized polymerase chain reaction device. We demonstrated the system's capability by amplification of complementary deoxyribonucleic acid (cDNA) of the dengue fever virus. The resulting data were then automatically uploaded via a Bluetooth interface to an Androidbased smartphone and then wirelessly sent to a global network, instantly making the test results available anywhere in the world. The IoT system presented here could become an essential tool for healthcare centers to tackle infectious disease outbreaks identified either by DNA or ribonucleic acid.

Abstract-. In this paper we present an experiment addressing the effect of voice pitch on the evaluation of a social robot receptionist. Twenty eight test participants interacted with two "female" robot characters: one with a high-pitched, exuberant voice, the other with a low-pitched, calm voice. Our results show that the high pitch robot was perceived significantly more attractive in terms of voice, behavior and personality. We also found that the increased level of the robot's attractiveness induced significantly better ratings on the overall enjoyment and overall interaction quality. With our study we would like to stress the importance of the voice, in general (and the voice pitch, in particular) in the social robot design and to encourage further research in this topic within the HCI (in particular HRI -Human Robot Interaction) community.

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In this paper we present a multifunctional conversational agent which combines natural language search capabilities for two different domain applications: a conference information system and local tourist guide. The paper describes the corpora, architecture, algorithm and the mobile application created to interact with the users. Finally, some results obtained when using the proposed system in the context of an international scientific conference held in Singapore in September 2014 with more than 1200 assistants are provided.