19,606 research outputs found

    Security and Privacy Problems in Voice Assistant Applications: A Survey

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    Voice assistant applications have become omniscient nowadays. Two models that provide the two most important functions for real-life applications (i.e., Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Siri, etc.) are Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models and Speaker Identification (SI) models. According to recent studies, security and privacy threats have also emerged with the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT). The security issues researched include attack techniques toward machine learning models and other hardware components widely used in voice assistant applications. The privacy issues include technical-wise information stealing and policy-wise privacy breaches. The voice assistant application takes a steadily growing market share every year, but their privacy and security issues never stopped causing huge economic losses and endangering users' personal sensitive information. Thus, it is important to have a comprehensive survey to outline the categorization of the current research regarding the security and privacy problems of voice assistant applications. This paper concludes and assesses five kinds of security attacks and three types of privacy threats in the papers published in the top-tier conferences of cyber security and voice domain.Comment: 5 figure

    Chinese Open Instruction Generalist: A Preliminary Release

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    Instruction tuning is widely recognized as a key technique for building generalist language models, which has attracted the attention of researchers and the public with the release of InstructGPT~\citep{ouyang2022training} and ChatGPT\footnote{\url{https://chat.openai.com/}}. Despite impressive progress in English-oriented large-scale language models (LLMs), it is still under-explored whether English-based foundation LLMs can perform similarly on multilingual tasks compared to English tasks with well-designed instruction tuning and how we can construct the corpora needed for the tuning. To remedy this gap, we propose the project as an attempt to create a Chinese instruction dataset by various methods adapted to the intrinsic characteristics of 4 sub-tasks. We collect around 200k Chinese instruction tuning samples, which have been manually checked to guarantee high quality. We also summarize the existing English and Chinese instruction corpora and briefly describe some potential applications of the newly constructed Chinese instruction corpora. The resulting \textbf{C}hinese \textbf{O}pen \textbf{I}nstruction \textbf{G}eneralist (\textbf{COIG}) corpora are available in Huggingface\footnote{\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/COIG}} and Github\footnote{\url{https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagInstruct}}, and will be continuously updated

    The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions

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    The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed, including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture. Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic, multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions, and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users, scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution

    Conditional Adapters: Parameter-efficient Transfer Learning with Fast Inference

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    We propose Conditional Adapter (CoDA), a parameter-efficient transfer learning method that also improves inference efficiency. CoDA generalizes beyond standard adapter approaches to enable a new way of balancing speed and accuracy using conditional computation. Starting with an existing dense pretrained model, CoDA adds sparse activation together with a small number of new parameters and a light-weight training phase. Our experiments demonstrate that the CoDA approach provides an unexpectedly efficient way to transfer knowledge. Across a variety of language, vision, and speech tasks, CoDA achieves a 2x to 8x inference speed-up compared to the state-of-the-art Adapter approach with moderate to no accuracy loss and the same parameter efficiency

    One Small Step for Generative AI, One Giant Leap for AGI: A Complete Survey on ChatGPT in AIGC Era

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    OpenAI has recently released GPT-4 (a.k.a. ChatGPT plus), which is demonstrated to be one small step for generative AI (GAI), but one giant leap for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Since its official release in November 2022, ChatGPT has quickly attracted numerous users with extensive media coverage. Such unprecedented attention has also motivated numerous researchers to investigate ChatGPT from various aspects. According to Google scholar, there are more than 500 articles with ChatGPT in their titles or mentioning it in their abstracts. Considering this, a review is urgently needed, and our work fills this gap. Overall, this work is the first to survey ChatGPT with a comprehensive review of its underlying technology, applications, and challenges. Moreover, we present an outlook on how ChatGPT might evolve to realize general-purpose AIGC (a.k.a. AI-generated content), which will be a significant milestone for the development of AGI.Comment: A Survey on ChatGPT and GPT-4, 29 pages. Feedback is appreciated ([email protected]

    Testing the nomological network for the Personal Engagement Model

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    The study of employee engagement has been a key focus of management for over three decades. The academic literature on engagement has generated multiple definitions but there are two primary models of engagement: the Personal Engagement Model of Kahn (1990), and the Work Engagement Model (WEM) of Schaufeli et al., (2002). While the former is cited by most authors as the seminal work on engagement, research has tended to focus on elements of the model and most theoretical work on engagement has predominantly used the WEM to consider the topic. The purpose of this study was to test all the elements of the nomological network of the PEM to determine whether the complete model of personal engagement is viable. This was done using data from a large, complex public sector workforce. Survey questions were designed to test each element of the PEM and administered to a sample of the workforce (n = 3,103). The scales were tested and refined using confirmatory factor analysis and then the model was tested determine the structure of the nomological network. This was validated and the generalisability of the final model was tested across different work and organisational types. The results showed that the PEM is viable but there were differences from what was originally proposed by Kahn (1990). Specifically, of the three psychological conditions deemed necessary for engagement to occur, meaningfulness, safety, and availability, only meaningfulness was found to contribute to employee engagement. The model demonstrated that employees experience meaningfulness through both the nature of the work that they do and the organisation within which they do their work. Finally, the findings were replicated across employees in different work types and different organisational types. This thesis makes five contributions to the engagement paradigm. It advances engagement theory by testing the PEM and showing that it is an adequate representation of engagement. A model for testing the causal mechanism for engagement has been articulated, demonstrating that meaningfulness in work is a primary mechanism for engagement. The research has shown the key aspects of the workplace in which employees experience meaningfulness, the nature of the work that they do and the organisation within which they do it. It has demonstrated that this is consistent across organisations and the type of work. Finally, it has developed a reliable measure of the different elements of the PEM which will support future research in this area

    Increased lifetime of Organic Photovoltaics (OPVs) and the impact of degradation, efficiency and costs in the LCOE of Emerging PVs

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    Emerging photovoltaic (PV) technologies such as organic photovoltaics (OPVs) and perovskites (PVKs) have the potential to disrupt the PV market due to their ease of fabrication (compatible with cheap roll-to-roll processing) and installation, as well as their significant efficiency improvements in recent years. However, rapid degradation is still an issue present in many emerging PVs, which must be addressed to enable their commercialisation. This thesis shows an OPV lifetime enhancing technique by adding the insulating polymer PMMA to the active layer, and a novel model for quantifying the impact of degradation (alongside efficiency and cost) upon levelized cost of energy (LCOE) in real world emerging PV installations. The effect of PMMA morphology on the success of a ternary strategy was investigated, leading to device design guidelines. It was found that either increasing the weight percent (wt%) or molecular weight (MW) of PMMA resulted in an increase in the volume of PMMA-rich islands, which provided the OPV protection against water and oxygen ingress. It was also found that adding PMMA can be effective in enhancing the lifetime of different active material combinations, although not to the same extent, and that processing additives can have a negative impact in the devices lifetime. A novel model was developed taking into account realistic degradation profile sourced from a literature review of state-of-the-art OPV and PVK devices. It was found that optimal strategies to improve LCOE depend on the present characteristics of a device, and that panels with a good balance of efficiency and degradation were better than panels with higher efficiency but higher degradation as well. Further, it was found that low-cost locations were more favoured from reductions in the degradation rate and module cost, whilst high-cost locations were more benefited from improvements in initial efficiency, lower discount rates and reductions in install costs

    Interactive Sonic Environments: Sonic artwork via gameplay experience

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    The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of video-game technology in the design and implementation of interactive sonic centric artworks, the purpose of which is to create and contribute to the discourse and understanding of its effectiveness in electro-acoustic composition highlighting the creative process. Key research questions include: How can the language of electro-acoustic music be placed in a new framework derived from videogame aesthetics and technology? What new creative processes need to be considered when using this medium? Moreover, what aspects of 'play' should be considered when designing the systems? The findings of this study assert that composers and sonic art practitioners need little or no coding knowledge to create exciting applications and the myriad of options available to the composer when using video-game technology is limited only by imagination. Through a cyclic process of planning, building, testing and playing these applications the project revealed advantages and unique sonic opportunities in comparison to other sonic art installations. A portfolio of selected original compositions, both fixed and open are presented by the author to complement this study. The commentary serves to place the work in context with other practitioners in the field and to provide compositional approaches that have been taken
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