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Since its inception in 2016, the Alexa Prize program has enabled hundreds of university students to explore and compete to develop conversational agents through the SocialBot Grand Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to build agents…
The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based Virtual Assistants (VAs) e.g., Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and High-Flyer Deepseek has turned them into convenient interfaces for managing emerging technologies such…
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.…
Human values are an important aspect of life and should be supported in ubiquitous technologies such as mobile applications (apps). There has been a lot of focus on fixing certain kinds of violation of human values, especially privacy,…
Chatbots, the common moniker for collaborative assistants, are Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that enables people to naturally interact with them to get tasks done. Although chatbots have been studied since the dawn of AI, they have…
The adoption of modern technologies for use in healthcare has become an inevitable change. The emergence of artificial intelligence drives this digital disruption. Artificial intelligence has augmented machine capabilities to act like and…
Voice has become an increasingly popular User Interaction (UI) channel, mainly contributing to the ongoing trend of wearables, smart vehicles, and home automation systems. Voice assistants such as Siri, Google Now and Cortana, have become…
As technology and technology companies have grown in power, ubiquity, and societal influence, some companies -- and notably some mobile apps -- have come to be perceived as privacy threats. Prior work has considered how various factors…
Mobile apps used by children often make use of harmful techniques, such as data tracking and targeted advertising. Previous research has suggested that developers face several systemic challenges in designing apps that prioritise children's…
Smart home voice assistants enable users to conveniently interact with IoT devices and perform Internet searches; however, they also collect the voice input that can carry sensitive personal information about users. Previous papers…
Conversational systems use spoken language to interact with their users. Although conversational systems, such as Amazon Alexa, are becoming common and afford interesting functionalities, there is little known about the issues users of…
Privacy in speech and audio has many facets. A particularly under-developed area of privacy in this domain involves consideration for information related to content and context. Speech content can include words and their meaning or even…
Never before has any OS been so popular as Android. Existing mobile phones are not simply devices for making phone calls and receiving SMS messages, but powerful communication and entertainment platforms for web surfing, social networking,…
The performance of a voice anonymization system is typically measured according to its ability to hide the speaker's identity and keep the data's utility for downstream tasks. This means that the requirements the anonymization should…
A growing concern with advertisement libraries on Android is their ability to exfiltrate personal information from their host applications. While previous work has looked at the libraries' abilities to measure private information on their…
An Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent is a software entity that autonomously performs tasks or makes decisions based on pre-defined objectives and data inputs. AI agents, capable of perceiving user inputs, reasoning and planning tasks, and…
The growing use of voice user interfaces has led to a surge in the collection and storage of speech data. While data collection allows for the development of efficient tools powering most speech services, it also poses serious privacy…
The complex nature of intelligent systems motivates work on supporting users during interaction, for example through explanations. However, as of yet, there is little empirical evidence in regard to specific problems users face when…
Privacy, security, and accessibility, like ethical concerns in mobile applications (a.k.a. apps), commonly subsumed under non-functional requirements, are generally reported by users through app reviews available in app stores. However,…
The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to…