Australia’s Most Extreme Bushfire Season, Statistically Speaking

Talking to machines (statistically speaking)

Statistical methods have long been the dominant approach in speech recognition and probabilistic modelling in ASR is now a mature technology. The use of statistical methods in other areas of spoken dialogue is however more recent and rather less mature. This paper reviews spoken dialogue systems from a statistical modelling perspective. The complete system is first presented as a partially obse...

Quantitative bushfire risk assessment framework for severe and extreme fires

Talkin' bout a revolution (statistically speaking) [Invited Talk]

This talk will describe new methods for generating Natural Language in interactive systems – methods which are similar to planning approaches, but which use statistical machine learning to develop adaptive NLG components. Employing statistical models of users, generation contexts, and of Natural Languages themselves, has several potentially beneficial features: the ability to train models on re...

The Most Extreme Risks: Global Catastrophes

The most extreme risk are those that threaten the entirety of human civilization, known as global catastrophic risks. The very extreme nature of global catastrophes makes them both challenging to analyze and important to address. They are challenging to analyze because they are largely unprecedented and because they involve the entire global human system. They are important to address because t...

An extreme bushfire smoke pollution event: health impacts and public health challenges.

AIMS To determine the health impacts of smoke and the effectiveness of public health advisories during a severe bushfire smoke event in Albury, NSW. METHODS The NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change provided PM(10) data. A computer-assisted telephone survey using random digit dialling was conducted following the smoke event to assess health impacts and the effectiveness of advisori...