Topic outline

  • General

    Topic of this seminar will be "Privacy in speech and audio interfaces".


    The course consists of introductory lectures, small home assignments, a written summary (3 ECTS) or a more extensive review or speech processing experiments (5 ECTS) on a chosen topic, and participating and giving seminar presentations. 

    Teacher of the course is Professor of Practice Tom Bäckström. Please contact tom.backstrom@aalto.fi if you have any questions on the course. 

    The course can be taken as a 3 ECTS or 5 ECTS version depending on the desired workload.

    Grading: pass/fail.

    A brief description of the topic

    Privacy is all over the news. Just think of Cambridge Analytica, Amazon Alexa leaking private conversations and Google storing your location even when you have opted out.  

           What does that mean for speech and audio processing?

    The ability of devices to process speech and audio is increasing rapidly. It is no longer only phones which process and transmit speech, but also computers, TVs, smartwatches and in the near future, likely also home appliances such as washing machines and lightswitches. It is the IoT of audio-enabled devices. For quality of services this has several benefits; more microphones can be used to improve audio quality and you are probably not anymore tied to a single device to get Siri to answer you. Likewise, cloud-services can offer better service the more they know about the user. Increasing capabilities and interaction between devices however raise important questions about privacy, such as:

    1. Which devices/services are allowed to process your speech? Your own devices, all devices, none or something else? 
    2. How do we prevent unauthorized devices to get access to your speech?
    3. Big-data can be very, very useful. Can we get the benefits of big-data in speech applications without sacrificing privacy? 

    The goal of the present seminar course is to familiarize students with the existing and ongoing research and methods in the area. We will explore different areas of speech and audio where privacy is an issue as well as study methods for preserving privacy. In addition, students will get familiar with searching, interpreting, and summarizing existing research literature in speech technology, and presenting their work.Those undertaking a 5-credit version of the course can either carry out their own experiments in privacy-related speech or audio processing tasks or conduct a more extensive critical review on a mutually agreed topic.


    Some potential topics for seminar projects/presentations (under construction)

    On a high level, the project and presentation topics include areas such as

    • Privacy-preserving speech recognition in the cloud
    • Privacy-preserving machine learning methods for audio event detection
    • Privacy-preserving speaker verification
    • Speaker identification and spoofing
    • Audio fingerprinting for private authentication
    • Privacy in room-acoustics

    On a practical level, the starting point can be, for example, one of the following articles:

    More obscure but exciting / project ideas:

    Alternatively, students can suggest their own topics. 


    Expected background knowledge

    Basic skills in speech processing, DSP, and machine learning are recommended to get maximal benefit from the course (e.g., ELEC-E5500 Speech Processing or ELEC-E5510 Speech Recognition). However, the course can be tailored to a large extent to the preferences of the students. If you're unsure whether your background fits (it probably does), please contact tom.backstrom@aalto.fi.


    Course schedule (preliminary)

    22.1.2019     at 14–16 R030/A133 T5: Seminar kick-off. Course practices. Introduction to privacy in speech and audio interfaces.
    29.1.2019     at 10-12 R030/T6 A136 and 14-16 R030/A133 T5: Visiting lectures: prof. Susanna Lindroos-Hovinheimo, prof. Stephan Sigg, PhD Michael Laakasuo
    5.2.2019 at 14-16 R030/A133 T5: Selecting topics for seminar reports and presentations. Schedule and workload planning.
    10.2.2019 DL for experimental project proposals (5 ECTS version; send to teacher by email)
    12.2.2019 at 14-16 R030/A133 T5: On reserve
    ...
    19.3.2019 at 14-16 R030/T6 A136: Seminar presentations 
    26.3.2019 at 14-16 R030/T6 A136: No lecture
    2.4.2019     at 14-16 R030/T6 A136: Seminar presentations + final discussion. DL for the first versions of the reports (for feedback).

    24.4.2019 Final DL for reports.