January 2023

Tracking and Detecting Fake News and Deepfakes in Arabic Social Networks The 4th Generation War (4GW) is known as an information war involving non-military populations. It is conducted by national or transnational groups following ideologies based on cultural beliefs, religion, economic or political interests, aiming to sow chaos in a targeted region globally. In 1989, authors discussing the 4th generation war, some of whom were military experts, explained that it would be widespread and challenging to define in the decades to come. With the emergence of social networks, the previously vague battlefield found a platform for 4GW. One of its penetration points is the extensive use of social networks to manipulate opinions, aiming to shape the targeted region’s perspective to accept a certain state of affairs and render it socially and politically acceptable. Much like the 4th generation war, cognitive warfare aims to blur comprehension mechanisms regarding politics, economy, religion, etc. Its consequence is destabilizing and weakening the adversary. This cognitive war targets what is assumed to be the enemy’s brain, altering reality by flooding the adversary’s population with misleading information, rumors, or manipulated videos. Furthermore, the proliferation of social bots today enables automated dissemination of disinformation on social networks. Plus d'infos

Efficient Self-Supervised Learning for Inclusive and Innovative Speech Technologies Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has recently emerged as an incredibly promising artificial intelligence (AI) method. Through this method, massive amounts of unlabeled data that are accessible can be utilized by AI systems to surpass known performances. Particularly, the field of Automatic Speech Processing (ASP) is swiftly being transformed by the arrival of SSL, thanks in part to massive industrial investments and the explosion of data, both provided by a handful of companies. The performance gains are impressive, but the complexity of SSL models requires researchers and industry professionals in the field to have extraordinary computational capacity, drastically limiting access to fundamental research in this area and its deployment in everyday products. For instance, a significant portion of work using an SSL model for ASP relies on a system maintained and provided by a single company (wav2vec 2.0). The entire lifecycle of the technology, from its theoretical foundations to its practical deployment and societal analysis, therefore depends solely on institutions with the physical and financial means to support the intensity of this technique’s development. The E-SSL project aims to restore to the scientific community and ASP industry the necessary control over self-supervised learning Plus d'infos

Development of a methodology for evaluating voice identification systems The BRUEL project concerns the evaluation/certification of voice identification systems against adversarial attacks. Indeed, speaker recognition systems are vulnerable not only to speech artificially produced by voice synthesis but also to other forms of attacks such as voice identity conversion and replay attacks. The artifacts created during the creation or manipulation of these fraudulent attacks leave marks in the signal by voice synthesis algorithms, thus distinguishing the original real voice from a forged voice. Under these conditions, detecting identity theft requires evaluating identity theft countermeasures concurrently with speaker recognition systems. The BRUEL project aims to propose the first methodology for evaluating/certifying voice identification systems based on a Common Criteria approach. List of partners: CEA Eurecom Service National de Police Scientifique IRCAM LIA Laboratoire d’Informatique d’Avignon Project Coordinator: LIA Scientific Manager for LIA: Driss Matrouf Start Date: 01/01/2023 End Date: 30/06/2026 More