A High Quality Text-To-Speech System Composed of Multiple Neural Networks

While neural networks have been employed to handle several different text-to-speech tasks, ours is the first system to use neural networks throughout, for both linguistic and acoustic processing. We divide the text-to-speech task into three subtasks, a linguistic module mapping from text to a linguistic representation, an acoustic module mapping from the linguistic representation to speech, and a video module mapping from the linguistic representation to animated images. The linguistic module employs a letter-to-sound neural network and a postlexical neural network. The acoustic module employs a duration neural network and a phonetic neural network. The visual neural network is employed in parallel to the acoustic module to drive a talking head. The use of neural networks that can be retrained on the characteristics of different voices and languages affords our system a degree of adaptability and naturalness heretofore unavailable.Comment: Source link (9812006.tar.gz) contains: 1 PostScript file (4 pages) and 3 WAV audio files. If your system does not support Windows WAV files, try a tool like "sox" to translate the audio into a format of your choic

Transients at stop-consonant releases

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 157-158).by Noel Steven Massey.M.S

Driver Advocate™ Tool

Using scenario driven research, a Driver AdvocateTM (DA) [1] system has been designed to advise the driver about potentially unsafe situations based on information from environmental sensors [2]. DA is an intelligent dynamic system that monitors, senses, prioritizes, personalizes, and sends alerts to the driver appropriate to the moment. This has the potential to sharply decrease driver distraction and inattention. To support the realization of DA, a DA Tool (DAT) has been developed to coordinate with a KQ (previously Hyperion) virtual driving simulator and allow the merging of the simulated driving performance, the enviormental sensors, and the intelligent use of audio, visual, and tactile feedback to alert the driver to potential danger and unsafe driving behavior. DAT monitors the traffic, lane following, forward and side clearances, vehicle condition, cockpit distractions, Infotainment use, and the driver affective behavior. The DAT is designed to be highly configurable, flexible, and user friendly to facilitate creative freedom in designing usability and human factors experiments and rapid prototyping

Inattentional Blindness While Driving

Mack and Rock’s research (1999), suggests that we perceive only those objects and events to which we directly attend. This means that the majority of unexpected visual information goes unnoticed, no matter how dramatic or important it may be. Not noticing unexpected objects in direct view because your attention is on other driving events is a potentially deadly but common phenomenon. Most drivers have experienced these brief moments of “functional blindness” and not perceived events or objects directly and obviously centered in their field of vision. This usually produces astonishment, alarm, and possible over-reaction when awareness returns. The driver may be telling the truth to the officer after the crash, “I did not see that stop sign!” Other experiments (Simons and Chabris, 1999) have shown that “InAttentional Blindness” is exhibited by a majority of viewers when an unexpected object and action take place clearly, slowly, and within inches of objects being attended to. Wickens, et al. (1998) examined how pilots in flight simulators perform using head-up displays. The research showed that when experimenters put something unexpected, but important, in pilots’ field of vision, such as an airplane on the runway, pilots often land right on top of them. This paper will describe what we believe to be the first experiment explicitly designed to test this phenomenon while driving in a simulator. Our study is unlike the normal driver distraction study in that we did not ask the driver to divert attention to an off-the-road secondary task, but to keep attention focused solely on the road and the objects on it. Subjects drove on a two-lane road in a city environment generated by a 4-channel Class II GlobalSim driving simulator. We manipulated drivers’ attention by asking them to count the number of a specific type of pedestrian randomly interspersed with other pedestrians strolling along the right side of the road. Meanwhile various expected and unexpected critical driving events—stop signs at intersections (in the line of pedestrians), random lead car braking, and barriers in the roadway—were presented. The reaction times, as sensed by brake pedal pressure, to the critical driving events were recorded and compared to a baseline condition where the drivers were asked to merely follow normal driving procedures. Compared to the baseline, the pedestrian-monitoring task increased reaction times to all types of critical driving events. Subjective observations of drivers and implications for road safety will be discussed

Inattentional Blindness While Driving

Mack and Rock’s research (1999), suggests that we perceive only those objects and events to which we directly attend. This means that the majority of unexpected visual information goes unnoticed, no matter how dramatic or important it may be. Not noticing unexpected objects in direct view because your attention is on other driving events is a potentially deadly but common phenomenon. Most drivers have experienced these brief moments of “functional blindness” and not perceived events or objects directly and obviously centered in their field of vision. This usually produces astonishment, alarm, and possible over-reaction when awareness returns. The driver may be telling the truth to the officer after the crash, “I did not see that stop sign!” Other experiments (Simons and Chabris, 1999) have shown that “InAttentional Blindness” is exhibited by a majority of viewers when an unexpected object and action take place clearly, slowly, and within inches of objects being attended to. Wickens, et al. (1998) examined how pilots in flight simulators perform using head-up displays. The research showed that when experimenters put something unexpected, but important, in pilots’ field of vision, such as an airplane on the runway, pilots often land right on top of them. This paper will describe what we believe to be the first experiment explicitly designed to test this phenomenon while driving in a simulator. Our study is unlike the normal driver distraction study in that we did not ask the driver to divert attention to an off-the-road secondary task, but to keep attention focused solely on the road and the objects on it. Subjects drove on a two-lane road in a city environment generated by a 4-channel Class II GlobalSim driving simulator. We manipulated drivers’ attention by asking them to count the number of a specific type of pedestrian randomly interspersed with other pedestrians strolling along the right side of the road. Meanwhile various expected and unexpected critical driving events—stop signs at intersections (in the line of pedestrians), random lead car braking, and barriers in the roadway—were presented. The reaction times, as sensed by brake pedal pressure, to the critical driving events were recorded and compared to a baseline condition where the drivers were asked to merely follow normal driving procedures. Compared to the baseline, the pedestrian-monitoring task increased reaction times to all types of critical driving events. Subjective observations of drivers and implications for road safety will be discussed

Environmentalism, performance and applications: uncertainties and emancipations

This introductory article for a themed edition on environmentalism provides a particular context for those articles that follow, each of which engages with different aspects of environmentalism and performance in community-related settings. Responding to the proposition that there is a lacuna in the field of applied drama and environmentalism (Bottoms, 2010), we suggest that the more significant lack is that of ecocriticism. As the articles in this journal testify, there are many examples of applied theatre practice; what is required is sustained and rigorous critical engagement. It is to the gap of ecocriticism that we address this issue, signalling what we hope is the emergence of a critical field. One response to the multiple challenges of climate change is to more transparently locate the human animal within the environment, as one agent amongst many. Here, we seek to transparently locate the critic, intertwining the personal – ourselves, human actants – with global environmental concerns. This tactic mirrors much contemporary writing on climate change and its education, privileging personal engagement – a shift we interrogate as much as we perform. The key trope we anchor is that of uncertainty: the uncertainties that accompany stepping into a new research environment; the uncertainties arising from multiple relations (human and non-human); the uncertainties of scientific fact; the uncertainties of forecasting the future; and the uncertainties of outcomes – including those of performance practices. Having analysed a particular turn in environmental education (towards social learning) and the failure to successfully combine ‘art and reality’ in recent UK mainstream theatre events, such uncertainties lead to our suggestion for an ‘emancipated’ environmentalism. In support of this proposal, we offer up a reflection on a key weekend of performance practice that brought us to attend to the small – but not insignificant – and to consider first hand the complex relationships between environmental ‘grand narratives’ and personal experiential encounters. Locating ourselves within the field and mapping out some of the many conceptual challenges attached to it serves to introduce the territories which the following journal articles expand upon