Keynote speakers

Keynote 1

Tom Bäckström
Aalto University - Finland
13 September from 9.10 to 10.00

Conceptual Framework for Privacy in Voice Technology

In the last few years, I have been conceptualizing a holistic framework to address privacy in voice and speech technology. The purpose is to enable discussions, dissemination, and evaluation of the performance of complete systems. I present my current framework, which makes distinctions between objective protections for private messages and associated side-information, as well as the design of user-interfaces that reflect the objective level of privacy. Based on the methods presented, the most important current challenges, in research, are subjective privacy, theoretical metrics, computational complexity, and methods for disentanglement, as well as, in dissemination, communicating uncertainties in results.

Mobirise

Tom Bäckström D.Sc. (tech.) is an associate professor at Aalto University, Finland (2019-). He obtained his Master's and Doctoral degrees at the Helsinki University of Technology (the predecessor of Aalto) in 2001 and 2004, respectively. During his time at International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, Germany (2008-2016), he made contributions to several international speech and audio coding standards such as MPEG USAC and 3GPP EVS, and became a professor (W2) at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) (2012-2016). Before his current position, he was a professor practice at Aalto University (2016-2019). He was the initiator and chair of ISCA SIG "Security and Privacy in Speech Communication" (2019-2022) and is currently a member of the ISCA Board. His current research interests include privacy, coding, enhancement, and transmission of speech as well as machine learning.

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Keynote 2

Arun Ross
Michigan State University - USA
13 September from 14.00 to 14.50

Deepening Trust: Biometrics in a Deep Learning World

Biometrics is the science of recognizing individuals based on their physical and behavioral attributes such as fingerprints, face, iris, voice and gait. The past decade has witnessed tremendous progress in this field, including the deployment of biometric solutions in diverse applications such as border security, national ID cards, amusement parks, access control, and smartphones. Further, the paradigm of deep learning using deep neural networks is rapidly changing the landscape of biometrics. Despite these advancements, biometric systems have to contend with a number of challenges related to data integrity, spoof attacks, and personal privacy. This talk will highlight some of the recent progress made in the field of biometrics; present our lab’s work on topics such as presentation attack detection, privacy-enhancing techniques, and synthetic biometrics; and discuss some of the challenges that have to be solved in order to deepen society’s trust in biometric technology. 

Mobirise

Arun Ross is the Martin J. Vanderploeg Endowed Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, and the Site Director of NSF’s Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR). He conducts research on the topic of biometrics, privacy, computer vision and deep learning. He is a recipient of the JK Aggarwal Prize (2014) and the Young Biometrics Investigator Award (2013) from the International Association of Pattern Recognition for his contributions to the field of Pattern Recognition and Biometrics. He was designated a Kavli Fellow by the US National Academy of Sciences by virtue of his presentation at the 2006 Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposia. Ross is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award.
Ross has advocated for the responsible use of biometrics in multiple forums including the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Identity and Security in Switzerland in 2018. He testified as an expert panelist in an event organized by the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee at the UN Headquarters in 2013. In June 2022, he testified at the US House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on the topic of Biometrics and Personal Privacy. He is a co-author of the monograph “Handbook of Multibiometrics” and the textbook “Introduction to Biometrics”. 

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Keynote 3

Franck Dumortier
Cyber and Data Security Lab - Belgium
14 September from 9.10 to 10.00

The processing of facial images & the law

From the legal point of view, under the GDPR and the Police & Justice Directive, face recognition systems are considered as being "sensitive" if their purpose is to authenticate or identify data subjects. Additionnaly, for such kinds of processing operations, the current draft AI Act contain safeguards, such as for example, the explicit prohibition to use “real-time” remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces. However, legal questions remain about the regime applicable to databases containing images of natural persons that are not (intended to be) processed through a specific technical means allowing their unique identification or authentication. With that regard, it is also interesting to examine how current law applies to “synthetic” image data generated by AI generative models as well as to determine the applicable legal regime should such type of generated data be used for scientific biometric research. 

Mobirise

Since 2020, Franck Dumortier is a researcher at the Cyber & Data Security Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). In this role, he focuses on cybersecurity and cybercrime law, and how these norms relate to the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection. He combines this role with that of lecturer in the fields of privacy, cybersecurity and cybercrime within various training programmes. In addition, since April 2017, he has been working as a senior consultant at Cybersecurity-law.be, helping businesses and organisations to comply with privacy and data security requirements. He does this through advice, audits, coaching, training and other types of support. Since 2022, Franck is also member of the Brussels Control Commission (Regional Data Protection Authority). Between 2005 and 2020, Franck was a researcher at the "Centre de Recherche Information, Droit et Société" (CRIDS) at the University of Namur.

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Keynote 4

Nikolaos Ioannidis
Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Belgium
14 September from 14.00 to 14.50

Impact assessment for artificial intelligence under a fundamental rights lens

Algorithms are increasingly being adopted for decision-making, at the expense of the human agency. Such algorithms work by data processing, profiling, and inference drawing, supported by the utilization of AI. While complex algorithms facilitate decision-making, at the same time they bring to the fore a number of challenges, for example, the perpetuation of stereotypes and societal biases which are some of the risks (harms) to the rights and freedoms of natural persons. Data subjects casually end up being the data objects. The speech is founded on two pillars: a) data protection law, as the cornerstone for biometrics protection, and b) artificial intelligence law; through these, the aim is to explore the process of (data protection) impact assessment, or DPIA, could be an adequate means to protect fundamental rights in the context of artificial intelligence. In this talk, the work of our multidisciplinary lab (LSTS-VUB where the d.pia.lab and the cyber and data security lab belong) is presented, through the successful completion of EU-funded Horizon projects.

Mobirise

Nikolaos Ioannidis began as a doctoral researcher at the Research Group on Law, Science, Technology, and Society (LSTS) at the outset of 2020.
He graduated from the Law Faculty of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), where he additionally undertook the bar traineeship. He holds postgraduate degrees from KU Leuven and Université libre de Bruxelles in European Law and ICT Law. In 2014/5, he was a visiting student (Erasmus) at the University of Liège, where for two semesters he studied European law.
Previously, he worked in the Hellenic Army as a Reserve Officer in Telecommunications and Signals (2016-17) Right after, he completed the bar traineeship and worked as an associate lawyer in Thessaloniki, in a law firm specializing in IT law. After moving to Belgium, he joined the Center for IT and IP law (CiTiP) of KU Leuven working on two projects relating to smart cities and algorithmic transparency (2019). Before joining CDSL, he was a Blue Book trainee (2020) within the Policy and Consultation Unit of the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), where he mostly worked on AI regulation. While a Ph.D., he has worked on several Horizon projects around theories and practices of data protection, artificial intelligence, and impact assessment.

Coming Soon

Mobirise

PriMa has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 860315

TReSPAsS-ETN has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 860813

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