A Survey on Consumer IoT Traffic: Security and Privacy

For the past few years, the Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) has entered public lives. While CIoT has improved the convenience of people's daily lives, it has also brought new security and privacy concerns. In this survey, we try to figure out what researchers can learn about the security and privacy of CIoT by traffic analysis, a popular method in the security community. From the security and privacy perspective, this survey seeks out the new characteristics in CIoT traffic analysis, the state-of-the-art progress in CIoT traffic analysis, and the challenges yet to be solved. We collected 310 papers from January 2018 to December 2023 related to CIoT traffic analysis from the security and privacy perspective and summarized the process of CIoT traffic analysis in which the new characteristics of CIoT are identified. Then, we detail existing works based on five application goals: device fingerprinting, user activity inference, malicious traffic analysis, security analysis, and measurement. At last, we discuss the new challenges and future research directions.

Syntax-Guided Domain Adaptation for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims at extracting opinionated aspect terms in review texts and determining their sentiment polarities, which is widely studied in both academia and industry. As a fine-grained classification task, the annotation cost is extremely high. Domain adaptation is a popular solution to alleviate the data deficiency issue in new domains by transferring common knowledge across domains. Most cross-domain ABSA studies are based on structure correspondence learning (SCL), and use pivot features to construct auxiliary tasks for narrowing down the gap between domains. However, their pivot-based auxiliary tasks can only transfer knowledge of aspect terms but not sentiment, limiting the performance of existing models. In this work, we propose a novel Syntax-guided Domain Adaptation Model, named SDAM, for more effective cross-domain ABSA. SDAM exploits syntactic structure similarities for building pseudo training instances, during which aspect terms of target domain are explicitly related to sentiment polarities. Besides, we propose a syntax-based BERT mask language model for further capturing domain-invariant features. Finally, to alleviate the sentiment inconsistency issue in multi-gram aspect terms, we introduce a span-based joint aspect term and sentiment analysis module into the cross-domain End2End ABSA. Experiments on five benchmark datasets show that our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines with respect to Micro-F1 metric for the cross-domain End2End ABSA task.

LeVoice ASR Systems for the ISCSLP 2022 Intelligent Cockpit Speech Recognition Challenge

This paper describes LeVoice automatic speech recognition systems to track2 of intelligent cockpit speech recognition challenge 2022. Track2 is a speech recognition task without limits on the scope of model size. Our main points include deep learning based speech enhancement, text-to-speech based speech generation, training data augmentation via various techniques and speech recognition model fusion. We compared and fused the hybrid architecture and two kinds of end-to-end architecture. For end-to-end modeling, we used models based on connectionist temporal classification/attention-based encoder-decoder architecture and recurrent neural network transducer/attention-based encoder-decoder architecture. The performance of these models is evaluated with an additional language model to improve word error rates. As a result, our system achieved 10.2\% character error rate on the challenge test set data and ranked third place among the submitted systems in the challenge.

Generating Adversarial Samples For Training Wake-up Word Detection Systems Against Confusing Words

Wake-up word detection models are widely used in real life, but suffer from severe performance degradation when encountering adversarial samples. In this paper we discuss the concept of confusing words in adversarial samples. Confusing words are commonly encountered, which are various kinds of words that sound similar to the predefined keywords. To enhance the wake word detection system's robustness against confusing words, we propose several methods to generate the adversarial confusing samples for simulating real confusing words scenarios in which we usually do not have any real confusing samples in the training set. The generated samples include concatenated audio, synthesized data, and partially masked keywords. Moreover, we use a domain embedding concatenated system to improve the performance. Experimental results show that the adversarial samples generated in our approach help improve the system's robustness in both the common scenario and the confusing words scenario. In addition, we release the confusing words testing database called HI-MIA-CW for future research.

CGNN: Traffic Classification with Graph Neural Network

Traffic classification associates packet streams with known application labels, which is vital for network security and network management. With the rise of NAT, port dynamics, and encrypted traffic, it is increasingly challenging to obtain unified traffic features for accurate classification. Many state-of-the-art traffic classifiers automatically extract features from the packet stream based on deep learning models such as convolution networks. Unfortunately, the compositional and causal relationships between packets are not well extracted in these deep learning models, which affects both prediction accuracy and generalization on different traffic types. In this paper, we present a chained graph model on the packet stream to keep the chained compositional sequence. Next, we propose CGNN, a graph neural network based traffic classification method, which builds a graph classifier over automatically extracted features over the chained graph. Extensive evaluation over real-world traffic data sets, including normal, encrypted and malicious labels, show that, CGNN improves the prediction accuracy by 23\% to 29\% for application classification, by 2\% to 37\% for malicious traffic classification, and reaches the same accuracy level for encrypted traffic classification. CGNN is quite robust in terms of the recall and precision metrics. We have extensively evaluated the parameter sensitivity of CGNN, which yields optimized parameters that are quite effective for traffic classification.

The Role of Explainability in Assuring Safety of Machine Learning in Healthcare

Established approaches to assuring safety-critical systems and software are difficult to apply to systems employing machine learning (ML). In many cases, ML is used on ill-defined problems, e.g. optimising sepsis treatment, where there is no clear, pre-defined specification against which to assess validity. This problem is exacerbated by the "opaque" nature of ML where the learnt model is not amenable to human scrutiny. Explainable AI methods have been proposed to tackle this issue by producing human-interpretable representations of ML models which can help users to gain confidence and build trust in the ML system. However, there is not much work explicitly investigating the role of explainability for safety assurance in the context of ML development. This paper identifies ways in which explainable AI methods can contribute to safety assurance of ML-based systems. It then uses a concrete ML-based clinical decision support system, concerning weaning of patients from mechanical ventilation, to demonstrate how explainable AI methods can be employed to produce evidence to support safety assurance. The results are also represented in a safety argument to show where, and in what way, explainable AI methods can contribute to a safety case. Overall, we conclude that explainable AI methods have a valuable role in safety assurance of ML-based systems in healthcare but that they are not sufficient in themselves to assure safety.

The DKU System Description for The Interspeech 2021 Auto-KWS Challenge

This paper introduces the system submitted by the DKU-SMIIP team for the Auto-KWS 2021 Challenge. Our implementation consists of a two-stage keyword spotting system based on query-by-example spoken term detection and a speaker verification system. We employ two different detection algorithms in our proposed keyword spotting system. The first stage adopts subsequence dynamic time warping for template matching based on frame-level language-independent bottleneck feature and phoneme posterior probability. We use a sliding window template matching algorithm based on acoustic word embeddings to further verify the detection from the first stage. As a result, our KWS system achieves an average score of 0.61 on the feedback dataset, which outperforms the baseline1 system by 0.25.

Guidance on the Assurance of Machine Learning in Autonomous Systems (AMLAS)

Machine Learning (ML) is now used in a range of systems with results that are reported to exceed, under certain conditions, human performance. Many of these systems, in domains such as healthcare , automotive and manufacturing, exhibit high degrees of autonomy and are safety critical. Establishing justified confidence in ML forms a core part of the safety case for these systems. In this document we introduce a methodology for the Assurance of Machine Learning for use in Autonomous Systems (AMLAS). AMLAS comprises a set of safety case patterns and a process for (1) systematically integrating safety assurance into the development of ML components and (2) for generating the evidence base for explicitly justifying the acceptable safety of these components when integrated into autonomous system applications.

A Framework for Assurance of Medication Safety using Machine Learning

Medication errors continue to be the leading cause of avoidable patient harm in hospitals. This paper sets out a framework to assure medication safety that combines machine learning and safety engineering methods. It uses safety analysis to proactively identify potential causes of medication error, based on expert opinion. As healthcare is now data rich, it is possible to augment safety analysis with machine learning to discover actual causes of medication error from the data, and to identify where they deviate from what was predicted in the safety analysis. Combining these two views has the potential to enable the risk of medication errors to be managed proactively and dynamically. We apply the framework to a case study involving thoracic surgery, e.g. oesophagectomy, where errors in giving beta-blockers can be critical to control atrial fibrillation. This case study combines a HAZOP-based safety analysis method known as SHARD with Bayesian network structure learning and process mining to produce the analysis results, showing the potential of the framework for ensuring patient safety, and for transforming the way that safety is managed in complex healthcare environments.

The 2020 Personalized Voice Trigger Challenge: Open Database, Evaluation Metrics and the Baseline Systems

The 2020 Personalized Voice Trigger Challenge (PVTC2020) addresses two different research problems a unified setup: joint wake-up word detection with speaker verification on close-talking single microphone data and far-field multi-channel microphone array data. Specially, the second task poses an additional cross-channel matching challenge on top of the far-field condition. To simulate the real-life application scenario, the enrollment utterances are recorded from close-talking cell-phone only, while the test utterances are recorded from both the close-talking cell-phone and the far-field microphone arrays. This paper introduces our challenge setup and the released database as well as the evaluation metrics. In addition, we present a joint end-to-end neural network baseline system trained with the proposed database for speaker-dependent wake-up word detection. Results show that the cost calculated from the miss rate and the false alarm rate, can reach 0.37 in the close-talking single microphone task and 0.31 in the far-field microphone array task. The official website and the open-source baseline system have been released.