Our first privacy preservation tools have been released!

The COMPRISE Voice Transformer and the COMPRISE Text Transformer protect both the voice of the users and their personal information. These software tools can be easily integrated into existing voice technologies, and provide developers with open source, validated, private-by-design tools. The development of privacy-enhancing technologies in Europe is a crucial step forward in ensuring the resilience…

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COMPRISE @TSD’2020

Additional papers for the COMPRISE project have been accepted! The most recent ones will be published at the 23rd International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD’2020), and are the following: “Investigating the Impact of Pre-trained Word Embeddings on Memorization in Neural Networks” [Aleena Thomas, David Adelani, Ali Davody, Aditya Mogadala,…

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Third Plenary Meeting

The third COMPRISE plenary meeting was held remotely on June 03-04, 2020. We were thrilled to welcome the following advisory board members: Georg Rehm (META-NET) Fredrik Kronlid and Staffan Larsson (Talkamatic) Norbert Pfleger (Paragon Semvox) Eren Gölge (Mozilla)

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Special Issue on Voice Privacy

We are co-organizing a special issue on Voice Privacy that solicits papers describing advances in privacy protection for speech processing systems, including theoretical developments, algorithms or systems. Examples of topics relevant to the special issue include (but are not limited to): formal models of speech privacy preservation, privacy-preserving speech feature extraction,…

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COMPRISE Features Two Main Branches

> The operating branch runs a spoken dialogue system on the user’s device or on a personal server. The dialogue outcomes are sent to the company delivering the desired service only. The training branch removes personal information from voice data using privacy driven text and voice transformers. The transformed data are sent to the COMPRISE Cloud-based Platform to train the spoken dialogue system. COMPRISE VOICE TRANSFORMER Prevents…

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Privacy vs. usability

In our previous posts [Post1] and [Post2], we have presented a rather streamlined version of the issue at hand and introduced quite a few simplifications along the way. Still, we have seen that privacy transformations of text are complex. A number of challenges presented themselves and we have discussed a…

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COMPRISE is supporting the VoicePrivacy 2020 Challenge!

Registration is still open to take part in the first international challenge on speech data privacy. The VoicePrivacy initiative is spearheading the effort to develop privacy preservation solutions for speech technology. It aims to gather a new community to define the most effective processes and metrics, while also benchmarking the existing privacy-enabling solutions and creating…

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Handling private information in text

Removing sensitive portions from a text, sometimes known as “sanitizing”, is often done by simply blackening the relevant words. Many people have seen such a redacted document at some point, it’s a technique commonly applied to classified government reports, for instance. A prominent example of such a document from recent…

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Business Opportunities Around Voice Enabled Technologies

Compatibility and integration are becoming essential features for voice technologies. The expected increase in the development of mid-level devices, which are able to connect with smart speakers, although not being fully smart themselves, serves as the perfect example [Ref1]. Despite the popularity of voice technologies, 41% of voice users report concerns on trust, privacy and…

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COMPRISE @Rue89 Strasbourg

Emmanuel Vincent from INRIA was invited for a debate entitled “What voice assistants really know about us?”. Emmanuel explained the idea behind the COMPRISE project by highlighting the need to create a methodology that will protect the users’ data, in order to ensure their privacy. This was broadcast via the Rue89 Strasbourg media! Check…

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Voice-based applications for E-Health

Healthcare has been one of the countless beneficiaries of the revolutionary advances that widespread computing has brought. Fast, efficient data organisation, storage and access that have greatly sped up the medical enterprise, yet many low hanging fruits remain hanging. Chief among those is the increased application of technologies that can…

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Workshop for Riga’s Children’s Hospital

Our partner Tilde has organized a workshop for Riga’s Children’s Hospital. The workshop covered two main topics: (1) eventual use-case scenarios for two Tilde/COMPRISE demonstrators and (2) availability of data for system training and testing. Participants got brief introduction of the COMPRISE project and its objectives as well as the underlying technologies of…

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COMPRISE @CCS’2019

As part of COMPRISE, the work “Private Protocols for U-Statistics in the Local Model and Beyond” [James Bell, Aurélien Bellet, Adria Gascon, Tejas Kulkarni] has been accepted for presentation at two workshops part of CCS’2019: Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP) and Privacy Preserving Machine Learning (PPML). Congratulations to our team!…

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COMPRISE @Science festival

Emmanuel Vincent, Irina Illina, and Brij Mohan Lal Srivastava demonstrated the privacy-driven voice transformation technology developed in COMPRISE as part of the Science festival at Université de Lorraine! It was a great interaction between INRIA’s members and several groups of junior high school students, students and staff of Université de Lorraine…

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COMPRISE @Showcase H2020 and INEA

COMPRISE was presented at the “Showcasing Language Technology in H2020 and CEF Telecom Projects” workshop that was held on the 26 of April 2019 in Brussels. The workshop introduced Digital Service Infrastructures and their stakeholders at Member State level to language technology related projects in the H2020 program and in CEF…

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