The Carnegie Mellon Portugal program selected seven exploratory research projects, of which five are led by Técnico professors and INESC-ID researchers. This Wednesday, 22nd April, FCT announced the list of funded projects. In total, 38 applications were submitted to the CMU Portugal Program.
The winning projects will serve as a basis for future projects. According to professor Nuno Nunes, national co-director of CMU Portugal Program, “these projects will serve to explore ideas born from needs identified by the scientific community, in a bottom-up way, that may be the basis for future projects”. “We hope that, above all, these projects will lead to the construction of systems that respond to real problems”, adds professor Rodrigo Rodrigues, also national co-director of the CMU Portugal Program.
Humor for Social Robots
The project titled “Automatic generation of humor for social robots (AGENTS)”, led by professor Ana Paiva, Técnico professor (Department of Computer Science and Engineering/DEI), was selected by CMU Portugal program and aims to give robots a sense of humor. “Humor is a circumscribed portion of natural language and, for this reason, it’s a well-defined engineering task”, says the leader of AGENTS. “However, humor is a phenomenon that emerges naturally in interactions between humans on a daily basis, and its complexity is difficult to capture through pre-defined and out-of-context jokes,” she points out.
Aware of the important role of humor in human communication, the project team intends to create robots or virtual agents capable of interacting in a more natural and humorous way with its users, in order to increase their social competence. “Positive interaction effects are expected between humans and social robots, through personalised humor. We propose the application of psychology of humor in order to create a top-down computational approach, in which humor can be modeled according to user preferences”, explains the professor. “On the other hand, the project will create a dataset on humor, with annotated jokes. Through the application of supervised machine learning techniques, the multimodal data collection of humorous interactions will be extracted and automated according to participants’ humor”, she adds. The ultimate goal is the implementation of personalised humorous interactions within a card game context, with more than one human and more than one robot or virtual agent.
The project combines the skills of three research teams: INESC-ID in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Social Robotics, (professor Ana Paiva), ISCTE-IUL in the field of Psychology (professor Patrícia Arriaga), and the Language Technology Institute at CMU, in the field of Machine Learning and Multimodal Interaction (professor Louis-Philippe Morency).
Privacy in speaker diarization
The widespread use of internet, the growing of cloud computing platforms and the recent progress in Artificial Intelligence, resulted in several cloud based MLaS – machine learning as a service. This growing popularity has brought an increased awareness that these can also potentially compromise users’ privacy. “The services can record customer service interactions and extract unauthorized information, using it to their advantage”, shares professor Isabel Trancoso, leader of another project selected by CMU. There has been an intensive public debate on this issue that culminated in the creation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
Also in the scientific community, the topic arouses concern as shown by the growth of research work related to this problem. “Speech stands out among other types of data due to its potential applications and private nature”, highlights the INESC-ID researcher. “There are ML [Machine Learning] models able to perform automatic transcriptions (Speech Recognition), to identify speakers and to detect “who spoke when” in a recording”, shares the professor.
The project titled “Privacy in speaker diarization: Detecting “who spoke when” privately” was selected by CMU Portugal and addresses the issues of privacy.
“Currently, the most promising methods of diarization are based on speaker embeddings, obtained from inner layers of deep neural networks. The combination of these techniques with cryptographic methods such as Homomorphic Encryption and Secure Computing, raises the need to create compromises between computational costs and server-client interactions”, says Isabel Trancoso, Técnico professor (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering/DEEC). “Although the community of security and privacy researchers is growing and several collaborations are being created between speech processing researchers, cryptographers and lawyers, the set solutions does not include privacy in speaker diarization, as far as we know, despite the importance of this problem ”, points out the INESC-ID researcher.
The teams invoved in this project – Técnico / INESC-ID and CMU / LTI – jointly developed several projects, theses, lectures and publications. “This project addresses the problem, so far unexplored, of detecting “who spoke when” privately, based on the experience of the two teams, and aims to contribute to the future development of cloud-based private speech recognition”, stresses professor Isabel Trancoso.
A password manager that offers a higher level of security
Organisations like LinkedIn, Yahoo !, Dropbox, Lastpass and eBay have been hacked in recent years, which resulted in millions of passwords stolen, leaving users at risk. The project “PassCert: Exploring the Impact of Formal Verification on the Adoption of Password Security Software”, led by João Ferreira, Técnico professor (Department of Computer Science and Engineering/DEI), was selected by CMU Portugal program and aims to minimize the impact this type of attacks through the development of a password manager that offers a higher level of security.
“This project is a synergy between two research topics: formal verification of software programs and password security. Although searching for viable alternatives, passwords are still the most commonly-used means of protecting private data”, highlights professor João Ferreira.
“Several studies show that users of systems protected by password continue to choose weak passwords, which are easy to break”, says the Técnico professor. For this reason, cyber security experts recommend the use of password managers that combine secure password storage with random and strong password generator. This important advice is not yet followed by many people, largely due to users’ distrust in storage mechanisms and the quality of passwords generated.
“PassCert” aims to “design a password manager that offers a higher level of security on data storage and password generation, through the use of formal verification”, says the Técnico professor.
“It is intended to assess if formal verification contributes to increase users’ confidence in password managers and, thus, starting using them”, stresses the professor. “The work developed in this project will result from a close collaboration between researchers from INESC-ID Lisboa, INESC TEC and Carnegie Mellon University.
Synthesizing Network Accelerators using different platforms
“Network operators like Altice, Vodafone, and NOS use a variety of network accelerators to benefit their customers, including security barriers that can prevent a potential attack and smart caching systems to speed up image and file loading. Network accelerators are the main component of 4G networks and will also be a main component of 5G”, explains Luís Pedrosa, Técnico professor (Department of Computer Science and Engineering/DEI) and coordinator of the project “Synthesizing Network Accelerators using Programmable Switching Equipment (SyNAPSE )”, selected by CMU Portugal.
SyNAPSE raises a very important question: “How can a computer engineer write code only once but target different hardware platforms?”. Through this project, “the code can be written only once and then a synthesizer generates it, so that it can run on a conventional server, on a P4 programmable switch, on a FPGA or on an OpenFlow switch”, explains the Técnico professor.
The project brings together renowned experts. “Prof. Ramos, Portuguese co-IR in this project, is an expert in OpenFlow and P4 software. Dr. Martins and Prof. Sherry, both from CMU, have expertise in program synthesis and development of network functions with FPGAs, respectively”, says the INESC-ID researcher. The Técnico professor contributes to this project through his experience in program analysis and software defined-networking.
According to professor Luís Pedrosa, this exploratory project has the “potential to start a new branch of research that can be used outside its immediate applications”. “We already have in mind the use of this type of synthesis to generate network functions in even more complex environments. We also have plans to explore other applications, particularly in distributed systems and the Internet of Things”, says the INESC-ID researcher. As compilers played a central role in software development 60 years ago, this project is a bridge to “a future where synthesizers can have a similar impact”, highlights the Técnico professor.
An innovative framework that aims to give software engineers more confidence
The project titled “SecurityAware: Fine-grained approach to detect and patch vulnerabilities”, led by professor Rui Maranhão aims to improve the productivity of software engineers, as well as the quality of the artifacts produced.
To this end, “an innovative framework for the automatic and efficient detection of vulnerabilities will be developed, following a fine-grained approach to detect and patch vulnerabilities”, says professor Rui Maranhão. “SecurityAware” aims to give “software engineers more confidence in the implementation and use of static analysis approaches, in continuous integration pipelines and software development”, adds the professor.
Rui Maranhão’s research team has been working in this area for some time. In this project, the INESC-ID / Técnico team will work in collaboration with a team from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
This funding will allow the team to “develop the preliminary studies that have already been carried out within this project and begin to pave the way for a bigger project”. “We also intend to involve junior researchers in order to convince them to pursue a PhD and a scientific career”, stresses the INESC-ID researcher.
According to professor Rui Maranhão, the several INESC-ID / Técnico projects selected by the CMU Portugal program, “shows the high-quality research carried out at Técnico, in this specific case, in the area of Information and Communications Technogy (ICT). It also demonstrates the internationalisation of INESC-ID / Técnico researchers, and this is further proof that that research that is being carried out can have a real impact”.
