AI Privacy and Security

We are surrounded by artificial intelligence. We have AI in our phones, in our computers, in our homes, in our cities, in an increasingly interconnected reality. We use AI to save time and make more accurate and automated decisions in many applications from healthcare to finance to policing to hiring. While this has brought amazing advancements, it has been shown, and there have been several headlines in the news about it, that AI may not be secure and may cause privacy violations. We need to ensure that AI treats us humans, and our data, fairly and safely, if we are to trust AI systems.

We are developing techniques for secure and privacy-respecting AI, particularly taking a human-centred approach, so that anyone, regardless of their knowledge of AI, could feel safe and in control when using it. We mainly focus on security and privacy in systems that use or embed AI, from voice-based or text-based AI Assistants (like Alexa, and Siri) to other types of Autonomous Systems and automated decision-making systems.

Related Projects

• Secure AI Assistants (EPSRC) - SAIS
• National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online (UKRI) - REPHRAIN
• Evaluating third-party smart home assistant developers (ICO) - link

Selected Publications

• Jide Edu, Xavier Ferrer-Aran, Jose Such, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil. Measuring Alexa Skill Privacy Practices across Three Years. In Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), 2022.       
• Noura Abdi, Xiao Zhan, Kopo Ramokapane, and Jose Such. Privacy Norms for Smart Home Personal Assistants. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2021.       
• Jide S. Edu, Jose Such, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil. Smart Home Personal Assistants: A Security and Privacy Review. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 53(6):116:1–116:36, 2021.       
• Noura Abdi, Marvin Ramokapane, and Jose Such. More than smart speakers: security and privacy perceptions of smart home personal assistants. In Usenix Fifteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), pp. 451–466, 2019.       
• Jose Such. Privacy and Autonomous Systems. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pp. 4761–4767, 2017.       
• Natalia Criado and Jose Such. Selective Norm Monitoring.. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pp. 208–214, 2016.       
• Jose Such, Agustin Espinosa, and Ana Garcia-Fornes. A survey of privacy in multi-agent systems. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 29(03):314–344, 2014.       

See more publications on this topic here