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Voice authentication on IoT-enabled smart devices has gained prominence in recent years due to increasing concerns over user privacy and security. The current authentication systems are vulnerable to different voice-spoofing attacks (e.g., replay, voice cloning, and audio deepfakes) that mimic legitimate voices to deceive authentication systems and enable fraudulent activities (e.g., impersonation, unauthorized access, financial fraud, etc.). Existing solutions are often designed to tackle a single type of attack, leading to compromised performance against unseen attacks. On the other hand, existing unified voice anti-spoofing solutions, not designed specifically for IoT, possess complex architectures and thus cannot be deployed on IoT-enabled smart devices. Additionally, most of these unified solutions exhibit significant performance issues, including higher equal error rates or lower accuracy for specific attacks. To overcome these issues, we present the parallel stacked aggregation network (PSA-Net), a lightweight framework designed as an anti-spoofing defense system for voice-controlled smart IoT devices. The PSA-Net processes raw audios directly and eliminates the need for dataset-dependent handcrafted features or pre-computed spectrograms. Furthermore, PSA-Net employs a split-transform-aggregate approach, which involves the segmentation of utterances, the extraction of intrinsic differentiable embeddings through convolutions, and the aggregation of them to distinguish legitimate from spoofed audios. In contrast to existing deep Resnet-oriented solutions, we incorporate cardinality as an additional dimension in our network, which enhances the PSA-Net ability to generalize across diverse attacks. The results show that the PSA-Net achieves more consistent performance for different attacks that exist in current anti-spoofing solutions., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2309.10560

Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising analytical tools. They can augment human epistemic, cognitive and reasoning abilities, and support 'sensemaking', making sense of a complex environment or subject by analysing large volumes of data with a sensitivity to context and nuance absent in earlier text processing systems. This paper presents a pilot experiment that explores how LLMs can support thematic analysis of controversial topics. We compare how human researchers and two LLMs GPT-4 and Llama 2 categorise excerpts from media coverage of the controversial Australian Robodebt scandal. Our findings highlight intriguing overlaps and variances in thematic categorisation between human and machine agents, and suggest where LLMs can be effective in supporting forms of discourse and thematic analysis. We argue LLMs should be used to augment, and not replace human interpretation, and we add further methodological insights and reflections to existing research on the application of automation to qualitative research methods. We also introduce a novel card-based design toolkit, for both researchers and practitioners to further interrogate LLMs as analytical tools., Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures

Distributed Deep Learning (DDL), as a paradigm, dictates the use of GPU-based clusters as the optimal infrastructure for training large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, the high cost of such resources makes them inaccessible to many users. Public cloud services, particularly Spot Virtual Machines (VMs), offer a cost-effective alternative, but their unpredictable availability poses a significant challenge to the crucial checkpointing process in DDL. To address this, we introduce DeepVM, a novel solution that recommends cost-effective cluster configurations by intelligently balancing the use of Spot and On-Demand VMs. DeepVM leverages a four-stage process that analyzes instance performance using the FLOPP (FLoating-point Operations Per Price) metric, performs architecture-level analysis with linear programming, and identifies the optimal configuration for the user-specific needs. Extensive simulations and real-world deployments in the AWS environment demonstrate that DeepVM consistently outperforms other policies, reducing training costs and overall makespan. By enabling cost-effective checkpointing with Spot VMs, DeepVM opens up DDL to a wider range of users and facilitates a more efficient training of complex DNNs., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures

The Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) system is vulnerable to fraudulent activities using audio deepfakes, also known as logical-access voice spoofing attacks. These deepfakes pose a concerning threat to voice biometrics due to recent advancements in generative AI and speech synthesis technologies. While several deep learning models for speech synthesis detection have been developed, most of them show poor generalizability, especially when the attacks have different statistical distributions from the ones seen. Therefore, this paper presents Quick-SpoofNet, an approach for detecting both seen and unseen synthetic attacks in the ASV system using one-shot learning and metric learning techniques. By using the effective spectral feature set, the proposed method extracts compact and representative temporal embeddings from the voice samples and utilizes metric learning and triplet loss to assess the similarity index and distinguish different embeddings. The system effectively clusters similar speech embeddings, classifying bona fide speeches as the target class and identifying other clusters as spoofing attacks. The proposed system is evaluated using the ASVspoof 2019 logical access (LA) dataset and tested against unseen deepfake attacks from the ASVspoof 2021 dataset. Additionally, its generalization ability towards unseen bona fide speech is assessed using speech data from the VSDC dataset.

Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) systems are increasingly used in voice bio-metrics for user authentication but are susceptible to logical and physical spoofing attacks, posing security risks. Existing research mainly tackles logical or physical attacks separately, leading to a gap in unified spoofing detection. Moreover, when existing systems attempt to handle both types of attacks, they often exhibit significant disparities in the Equal Error Rate (EER). To bridge this gap, we present a Parallel Stacked Aggregation Network that processes raw audio. Our approach employs a split-transform-aggregation technique, dividing utterances into convolved representations, applying transformations, and aggregating the results to identify logical (LA) and physical (PA) spoofing attacks. Evaluation of the ASVspoof-2019 and VSDC datasets shows the effectiveness of the proposed system. It outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, displaying reduced EER disparities and superior performance in detecting spoofing attacks. This highlights the proposed method's generalizability and superiority. In a world increasingly reliant on voice-based security, our unified spoofing detection system provides a robust defense against a spectrum of voice spoofing attacks, safeguarding ASVs and user data effectively.

Voice spoofing attacks pose a significant threat to automated speaker verification systems. Existing anti-spoofing methods often simulate specific attack types, such as synthetic or replay attacks. However, in real-world scenarios, the countermeasures are unaware of the generation schema of the attack, necessitating a unified solution. Current unified solutions struggle to detect spoofing artifacts, especially with recent spoofing mechanisms. For instance, the spoofing algorithms inject spectral or temporal anomalies, which are challenging to identify. To this end, we present a spectra-temporal fusion leveraging frame-level and utterance-level coefficients. We introduce a novel local spectral deviation coefficient (SDC) for frame-level inconsistencies and employ a bi-LSTM-based network for sequential temporal coefficients (STC), which capture utterance-level artifacts. Our spectra-temporal fusion strategy combines these coefficients, and an auto-encoder generates spectra-temporal deviated coefficients (STDC) to enhance robustness. Our proposed approach addresses multiple spoofing categories, including synthetic, replay, and partial deepfake attacks. Extensive evaluation on diverse datasets (ASVspoof2019, ASVspoof2021, VSDC, partial spoofs, and in-the-wild deepfakes) demonstrated its robustness for a wide range of voice applications.

Maker culture and DIY practices are central to democratizing the design of technology; enabling non-designers (future end-users) to actively participate in the design process. However, little is known about how individuals from under-resourced communities and low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, can practically leverage maker practices to design technology, creating value for themselves or their communities. To investigate this, we collaborated with an e-waste recycling centre, involving 24 participants (staff and low-SES volunteers) in two participatory maker workshop activities. Participants were provided with a generative e-waste toolkit, through which they repurposed e-waste materials and developed novel technology prototypes that created value from their perspectives and agendas. Our findings unpack three factors that influenced their making: balancing personal and community needs; incorporating convenience and productivity; and re-thinking sustainability and connection; and discuss strategies for scaffolding participation and engagement of under-resourced communities in making using an e-waste generative toolkit to democratize technology design., Comment: CHI-2023

Malicious actors may seek to use different voice-spoofing attacks to fool ASV systems and even use them for spreading misinformation. Various countermeasures have been proposed to detect these spoofing attacks. Due to the extensive work done on spoofing detection in automated speaker verification (ASV) systems in the last 6-7 years, there is a need to classify the research and perform qualitative and quantitative comparisons on state-of-the-art countermeasures. Additionally, no existing survey paper has reviewed integrated solutions to voice spoofing evaluation and speaker verification, adversarial/antiforensics attacks on spoofing countermeasures, and ASV itself, or unified solutions to detect multiple attacks using a single model. Further, no work has been done to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of published countermeasures in order to assess their generalizability by evaluating them across corpora. In this work, we conduct a review of the literature on spoofing detection using hand-crafted features, deep learning, end-to-end, and universal spoofing countermeasure solutions to detect speech synthesis (SS), voice conversion (VC), and replay attacks. Additionally, we also review integrated solutions to voice spoofing evaluation and speaker verification, adversarial and anti-forensics attacks on voice countermeasures, and ASV. The limitations and challenges of the existing spoofing countermeasures are also presented. We report the performance of these countermeasures on several datasets and evaluate them across corpora. For the experiments, we employ the ASVspoof2019 and VSDC datasets along with GMM, SVM, CNN, and CNN-GRU classifiers. (For reproduceability of the results, the code of the test bed can be found in our GitHub Repository.

We present the first quantum anonymous notification (QAN) protocol that introduces anonymity and paves the way for anonymous secure quantum communication in quantum networks. QAN protocol has applications ranging from multiparty quantum computation to quantum internet. We utilize the QAN protocol to propose an anonymous quantum private comparison protocol in an $n$-node quantum network. This protocol can compare private information of any $2 \leq k \leq n$ parties with the help of the remaining $n-k$ parties and a semi-honest third party. These protocols feature a traceless property, i.e., encoding operations cannot be traced back to their originating sources. Security analysis shows that this protocol is robust against external adversaries and malicious participants., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

Apple orchards in the U.S. are under constant threat from a large number of pathogens and insects. Appropriate and timely deployment of disease management depends on early disease detection. Incorrect and delayed diagnosis can result in either excessive or inadequate use of chemicals, with increased production costs, environmental, and health impacts. We have manually captured 3,651 high-quality, real-life symptom images of multiple apple foliar diseases, with variable illumination, angles, surfaces, and noise. A subset, expert-annotated to create a pilot dataset for apple scab, cedar apple rust, and healthy leaves, was made available to the Kaggle community for 'Plant Pathology Challenge'; part of the Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) workshop at CVPR 2020 (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition). We also trained an off-the-shelf convolutional neural network (CNN) on this data for disease classification and achieved 97% accuracy on a held-out test set. This dataset will contribute towards development and deployment of machine learning-based automated plant disease classification algorithms to ultimately realize fast and accurate disease detection. We will continue to add images to the pilot dataset for a larger, more comprehensive expert-annotated dataset for future Kaggle competitions and to explore more advanced methods for disease classification and quantification., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, Kaggle competition website: https://www.kaggle.com/c/plant-pathology-2020-fgvc7, CVPR fine-grained visual categorization website: https://sites.google.com/view/fgvc7/competitions

Future terabit networks are committed to dramatically improving big data motion between geographically dispersed HPC data centers.The scientific community takes advantage of the terabit networks such as DOE's ESnet and accelerates the trend to build a small world of collaboration between geospatial HPC data centers. It improves information and resource sharing for joint simulation and analysis between the HPC data centers. In this paper, we propose to build SCISPACE (Scientific Collaboration Workspace) for collaborative data centers. It provides a global view of information shared from multiple geo-distributed HPC data centers under a single workspace. SCISPACE supports native data-access to gain high-performance when data read or write is required in native data center namespace. It is accomplished by integrating a metadata export protocol. To optimize scientific collaborations across HPC data centers, SCISPACE implements search and discovery service. To evaluate, we configured two geo-distributed small-scale HPC data centers connected via high-speed Infiniband network, equipped with LustreFS. We show the feasibility of SCISPACE using real scientific datasets and applications. The evaluation results show average 36\% performance boost when the proposed native-data access is employed in collaborations., Comment: 8 pages including references

Deduplication has been largely employed in distributed storage systems to improve space efficiency. Traditional deduplication research ignores the design specifications of shared-nothing distributed storage systems such as no central metadata bottleneck, scalability, and storage rebalancing. Further, deduplication introduces transactional changes, which are prone to errors in the event of a system failure, resulting in inconsistencies in data and deduplication metadata. In this paper, we propose a robust, fault-tolerant and scalable cluster-wide deduplication that can eliminate duplicate copies across the cluster. We design a distributed deduplication metadata shard which guarantees performance scalability while preserving the design constraints of shared- nothing storage systems. The placement of chunks and deduplication metadata is made cluster-wide based on the content fingerprint of chunks. To ensure transactional consistency and garbage identification, we employ a flag-based asynchronous consistency mechanism. We implement the proposed deduplication on Ceph. The evaluation shows high disk-space savings with minimal performance degradation as well as high robustness in the event of sudden server failure., Comment: 6 Pages including references