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Virtual personal assistants (VPA) (e.g., Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant) today mostly rely on the voice channel to communicate with their users, which however is known to be vulnerable, lacking proper authentication. The rapid growth of…
The fast increase of web services and mobile apps, which collect personal data from users, increases the risk that their privacy may be severely compromised. In particular, the increasing variety of spoken language interfaces and voice…
Voice-based systems like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, along with the growing popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot, serve diverse populations, including visually impaired and low-literacy communities.…
In order to make spoken dialogue systems (such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant) more accessible and naturally interactive for people with cognitive impairments, appropriate data must be obtainable. Recordings of multi-modal spontaneous…
Smart cooking based on Amazon Echo uses the internet of things and cloud computing to assist in cooking food. People may speak to Amazon Echo during the cooking in order to get the information and situation of the cooking. Amazon Echo…
Recent advances in voice synthesis, coupled with the ease with which speech can be harvested for millions of people, introduce new threats to applications that are enabled by devices such as voice assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Google Home…
The popularity of smart-home assistant systems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home leads to a booming third-party application market (over 70,000 applications across the two stores). While existing works have revealed security issues in…
Motivated by the growing popularity of smart TVs, we present a large-scale measurement study of smart TVs by collecting and analyzing their network traffic from two different vantage points. First, we analyze aggregate network traffic of…
The recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have allowed individuals to rely on automated systems for a variety of reasons. Some of these systems are the currently popular voice-enabled systems like Echo by Amazon and Home by…
Smartness in smart cities is achieved by sensing phenomena of interest and using them to make smart decisions. Since the decision makers may not own all the necessary sensing infrastructures, crowdsourced sensing, can help collect important…
Smart recommendation algorithms have revolutionized content delivery and improved efficiency across various domains. However, concerns about user agency arise from the algorithms' inherent opacity (information asymmetry) and one-way output…
Recently emerged intelligent assistants on smartphones and home electronics (e.g., Siri and Alexa) can be seen as novel hybrids of domain-specific task-oriented spoken dialogue systems and open-domain non-task-oriented ones. To realize such…
Since being launched in 2014, Alexa, Amazon's versatile cloud-based voice service, is now active in over 100 million households worldwide. Alexa's user-friendly, personalized vocal experience offers customers a more natural way of…
We present Alexa versus Alexa (AvA), a novel attack that leverages audio files containing voice commands and audio reproduction methods in an offensive fashion, to gain control of Amazon Echo devices for a prolonged amount of time. AvA…
We introduce a variant of the speaker localization problem, which we call device arbitration. In the device arbitration problem, a user utters a keyword that is detected by multiple distributed microphone arrays (smart home devices), and we…
As the sociological theory of homophily suggests, people tend to interact with those of similar preferences. Motivated by this well-established phenomenon, today's online sellers, such as Amazon,~seek~to learn a new buyer's private…
AI chatbots are becoming a primary interface for seeking information. As their popularity grows, chatbot providers are starting to deploy advertising and analytics. Despite this, tracking on AI chatbots has not been systematically studied.…
In traditional (desktop) e-commerce search, a customer issues a specific query and the system returns a ranked list of products in order of relevance to the query. An increasingly popular alternative in e-commerce search is to issue a…
Conversational agents are consistently growing in popularity and many people interact with them every day. While many conversational agents act as personal assistants, they can have many different goals. Some are task-oriented, such as…
The daily activities performed by a disabled or elderly person can be monitored by a smart environment, and the acquired data can be used to learn a predictive model of user behavior. To speed up the learning, several researchers designed…