Investigating the relationship between stakeholder opinion about wildfire management and landscape context using GIS

Colorado residents living in the wildland urban interface (WUI) were asked about their perception of wildfire risk and their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for three fire management procedures: fuel reduction by thinning, fire suppression and prescribed fires. Respondent home locations were then digitized to enable the calculation of wildfire danger variables from various GIS map layers. These two processes resulted in perceived and actual wildfire risk variables which were then compared and analyzed. Perceived and actual fire danger variables were then used as explanatory variables in WTP functions. Results show that each fire management technique had different variables that would increase a persons WTP. However, overall, WTP values for each of the approaches were substantial. We believe this information shows that people living in the WUI would be willing-to-pay for an annual “wildfire management fee” to offset risks they consciously take by living in the WUI. This fee could potentially decrease the wildfire management cost burden that is currently incurred by taxpayers

The Effect of Speaking Rate on Audio and Visual Speech

The speed that an utterance is spoken affects both the duration of the speech and the position of the articulators. Consequently, the sounds that are produced are modified, as are the position and appearance of the lips, teeth, tongue and other visible articulators. We describe an experiment designed to measure the effect of variable speaking rate on audio and visual speech by comparing sequences of phonemes and dynamic visemes appearing in the same sentences spoken at different speeds. We find that both audio and visual speech production are affected by varying the rate of speech, however, the effect is significantly more prominent in visual speech

A Mouth Full of Words: Visually Consistent Acoustic Redubbing

This paper introduces a method for automatic redubbing of video that exploits the many-to-many mapping of phoneme sequences to lip movements modelled as dynamic visemes [1]. For a given utterance, the corresponding dynamic viseme sequence is sampled to construct a graph of possible phoneme sequences that synchronize with the video. When composed with a pronunciation dictionary and language model, this produces a vast number of word sequences that are in sync with the original video, literally putting plausible words into the mouth of the speaker. We demonstrate that traditional, one-to-many, static visemes lack flexibility for this application as they produce significantly fewer word sequences. This work explores the natural ambiguity in visual speech and offers insight for automatic speech recognition and the importance of language modeling

The Meaning of Place and Community in Contemporary Educational Discourse

Place and community are terms used with ever more frequency in discussions, reports, and research related to education, yet there is little agreement related to what these terms mean. This article examines the concepts of place and community in an attempt to bring more clarity to the role they may play in educational theory and, ultimately, educational policy

Mirroring to Build Trust in Digital Assistants

We describe experiments towards building a conversational digital assistant that considers the preferred conversational style of the user. In particular, these experiments are designed to measure whether users prefer and trust an assistant whose conversational style matches their own. To this end we conducted a user study where subjects interacted with a digital assistant that responded in a way that either matched their conversational style, or did not. Using self-reported personality attributes and subjects' feedback on the interactions, we built models that can reliably predict a user's preferred conversational style.Comment: Preprin