Multimodal person recognition for human-vehicle interaction

Next-generation vehicles will undoubtedly feature biometric person recognition as part of an effort to improve the driving experience. Today's technology prevents such systems from operating satisfactorily under adverse conditions. A proposed framework for achieving person recognition successfully combines different biometric modalities, borne out in two case studies

"How May I Help You?": Modeling Twitter Customer Service Conversations Using Fine-Grained Dialogue Acts

Given the increasing popularity of customer service dialogue on Twitter, analysis of conversation data is essential to understand trends in customer and agent behavior for the purpose of automating customer service interactions. In this work, we develop a novel taxonomy of fine-grained "dialogue acts" frequently observed in customer service, showcasing acts that are more suited to the domain than the more generic existing taxonomies. Using a sequential SVM-HMM model, we model conversation flow, predicting the dialogue act of a given turn in real-time. We characterize differences between customer and agent behavior in Twitter customer service conversations, and investigate the effect of testing our system on different customer service industries. Finally, we use a data-driven approach to predict important conversation outcomes: customer satisfaction, customer frustration, and overall problem resolution. We show that the type and location of certain dialogue acts in a conversation have a significant effect on the probability of desirable and undesirable outcomes, and present actionable rules based on our findings. The patterns and rules we derive can be used as guidelines for outcome-driven automated customer service platforms.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, IUI 201

Fingerprinting Smart Devices Through Embedded Acoustic Components

The widespread use of smart devices gives rise to both security and privacy concerns. Fingerprinting smart devices can assist in authenticating physical devices, but it can also jeopardize privacy by allowing remote identification without user awareness. We propose a novel fingerprinting approach that uses the microphones and speakers of smart phones to uniquely identify an individual device. During fabrication, subtle imperfections arise in device microphones and speakers which induce anomalies in produced and received sounds. We exploit this observation to fingerprint smart devices through playback and recording of audio samples. We use audio-metric tools to analyze and explore different acoustic features and analyze their ability to successfully fingerprint smart devices. Our experiments show that it is even possible to fingerprint devices that have the same vendor and model; we were able to accurately distinguish over 93% of all recorded audio clips from 15 different units of the same model. Our study identifies the prominent acoustic features capable of fingerprinting devices with high success rate and examines the effect of background noise and other variables on fingerprinting accuracy

Audio-Visual Speaker Verification via Joint Cross-Attention

Speaker verification has been widely explored using speech signals, which has shown significant improvement using deep models. Recently, there has been a surge in exploring faces and voices as they can offer more complementary and comprehensive information than relying only on a single modality of speech signals. Though current methods in the literature on the fusion of faces and voices have shown improvement over that of individual face or voice modalities, the potential of audio-visual fusion is not fully explored for speaker verification. Most of the existing methods based on audio-visual fusion either rely on score-level fusion or simple feature concatenation. In this work, we have explored cross-modal joint attention to fully leverage the inter-modal complementary information and the intra-modal information for speaker verification. Specifically, we estimate the cross-attention weights based on the correlation between the joint feature presentation and that of the individual feature representations in order to effectively capture both intra-modal as well inter-modal relationships among the faces and voices. We have shown that efficiently leveraging the intra- and inter-modal relationships significantly improves the performance of audio-visual fusion for speaker verification. The performance of the proposed approach has been evaluated on the Voxceleb1 dataset. Results show that the proposed approach can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods of audio-visual fusion for speaker verification

Effective Identity Management on Mobile Devices Using Multi-Sensor Measurements

Due to the dramatic increase in popularity of mobile devices in the past decade, sensitive user information is stored and accessed on these devices every day. Securing sensitive data stored and accessed from mobile devices, makes user-identity management a problem of paramount importance. The tension between security and usability renders the task of user-identity verification on mobile devices challenging. Meanwhile, an appropriate identity management approach is missing since most existing technologies for user-identity verification are either one-shot user verification or only work in restricted controlled environments. To solve the aforementioned problems, we investigated and sought approaches from the sensor data generated by human-mobile interactions. The data are collected from the on-board sensors, including voice data from microphone, acceleration data from accelerometer, angular acceleration data from gyroscope, magnetic force data from magnetometer, and multi-touch gesture input data from touchscreen. We studied the feasibility of extracting biometric and behaviour features from the on-board sensor data and how to efficiently employ the features extracted to perform user-identity verification on the smartphone device. Based on the experimental results of the single-sensor modalities, we further investigated how to integrate them with hardware such as fingerprint and Trust Zone to practically fulfill a usable identity management system for both local application and remote services control. User studies and on-device testing sessions were held for privacy and usability evaluation.Computer Science, Department o

Pattern mining approaches used in sensor-based biometric recognition: a review

Sensing technologies place significant interest in the use of biometrics for the recognition and assessment of individuals. Pattern mining techniques have established a critical step in the progress of sensor-based biometric systems that are capable of perceiving, recognizing and computing sensor data, being a technology that searches for the high-level information about pattern recognition from low-level sensor readings in order to construct an artificial substitute for human recognition. The design of a successful sensor-based biometric recognition system needs to pay attention to the different issues involved in processing variable data being - acquisition of biometric data from a sensor, data pre-processing, feature extraction, recognition and/or classification, clustering and validation. A significant number of approaches from image processing, pattern identification and machine learning have been used to process sensor data. This paper aims to deliver a state-of-the-art summary and present strategies for utilizing the broadly utilized pattern mining methods in order to identify the challenges as well as future research directions of sensor-based biometric systems

Semi-automated dialogue act classification for situated social agents in games

As a step toward simulating dynamic dialogue between agents and humans in virtual environments, we describe learning a model of social behavior composed of interleaved utterances and physical actions. In our model, utterances are abstracted as {speech act, propositional content, referent} triples. After training a classifier on 100 gameplay logs from The Restaurant Game annotated with dialogue act triples, we have automatically classified utterances in an additional 5,000 logs. A quantitative evaluation of statistical models learned from the gameplay logs demonstrates that semi-automatically classified dialogue acts yield significantly more predictive power than automatically clustered utterances, and serve as a better common currency for modeling interleaved actions and utterances