The second edition of the Symposium on Security & Privacy in Speech Communication, focuses on Speech and voice through which we express ourselves. As speech communication can be used to command virtual assistants to transport emotion or to identify oneself, the symposium encourages participants to give answers on how we can strengthen security and privacy for speech representation types in user-centric human/machine interaction? The symposium therefore sees that interdisciplinary exchange is in high demand and aims to bring together researchers and practitioners across multiple disciplines – more specifically: signal processing, cryptography, security, human-computer interaction, law and anthropology.

The second edition of the VoicePrivacy Challenge Workshop is spearheading the effort to develop privacy preservation solutions for speech technology. It aims to consolidate the newly formed community to develop the task and metrics and to benchmark progress in anonymization solutions using common datasets, protocols and metrics. VoicePrivacy takes the form of a competitive challenge. Participants are required to develop anonymization algorithms which conceal speaker identity within speech signals. At the same time, they should preserve linguistic content and naturalness. VoicePrivacy 2022 Challenge participants are encouraged to submit to the SPSC Symposium papers related to their Challenge entry, as well as other scientific papers related to voice privacy and anonymization.

To strengthen the efforts for both events, ease joined discussions, and extend the interdisciplinary exchange, we decided to combine our teams and organized a joined event. For the general symposium, we welcome contributions to related topics, as well as progress reports, project dissemination, or theoretical discussions and “work in progress”. In addition, guests from academia, industry and public institutions as well as interested students are welcome to attend the conference without having to make their own contribution.

Although, we aim for meeting all of you on-side, we also opt for virtual presentations during the workshop.

Call for Papers

The Symposium aims at laying the first building blocks required to address the question of how researchers and practitioners might bridge the gap between social perceptions and their technical counterparts with respect to what it means for our voices and speech to be secure and private. The symposium brings together researchers and practitioners across multiple disciplines – more specifically: signal processing, cryptography, security, human-computer interaction, law, and anthropology. By integrating different disciplinary perspectives on speech-enabled technology and applications, the SPSC Symposium opens opportunities to collect and merge input regarding technical and social practices, as well as a deeper understanding of the situated ethics at play.

The SPSC Symposium addresses interdisciplinary topics.

For more details, see CFP.

SPSC Topics regarding the technical perspective and the humanities view include, but are not limited to:

• Speech Communication on the sense of security and privacy
• Cybersecurity for speech processing
• Machine Learning to increase security and privacy
• Natural Language Processing and privacy
• Human-Computer Interfaces (Speech as Medium)
• Ethics & Law
• Digital Humanities

Submission:

Papers intended for the SPSC Symposium should be up to eight pages of text. The length should be chosen appropriately to present the topic to an interdisciplinary community. Paper submissions must conform to the format defined in the paper preparation guidelines and as detailed in the author’s kit. Papers must be submitted via the online paper submission system. The working language of the conference is English, and papers must be written in English.

Reviews:

At least three single-blind reviews are provided, and we aim to obtain feedback from interdisciplinary experts for each submission. For VoicePrivacy Challenge contributions, the review will be focused on the systems’ descriptions and the results.