Contributions to this post were provided by Monica Lam and Jen King from Stanford University. 

The New York Times recently published an article titled Stanford Team Aims at Alexa and Siri With a Privacy-Minded Alternative. Professor Monica Lam and her students, Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, Michael Fischer, and Mehrad Moradshahi, have developed a virtual assistant called Almond that can avoid surrendering personal information to a centralized service and encourage open competition among companies. She is joined by Stanford computer science researchers Michael Bernstein, Dan Boneh,  Jen King, James Landay, Chris Manning, and David Mazières, Chris Re in a newly funded NSF research grant to expand the capabilities and privacy protection of assistants.

Monica Lam presented work leading to this project at the Computing Research Association (CRA) Snowbird Conference in July 2018 and emphasized how we can make virtual assistants our ally if we use start using ones like Almond that are “Open-source decentralized virtual assistants.”

Another member of this team, Jen King, helped organize a series of Computing Community Consortium (CCC) workshops in 2015 and 2016 on Privacy by Design, including leading the first workshop called Privacy by Design- State of Research and Practice, which was in response to regulators, academics, and industry members calling for privacy-by-design as a way to address growing privacy concerns with rapidly developing technology.

It is great to see this research come together in a way to help preserve privacy while using personal assistants.

See the full article here to learn more.