Deep learning has enabled personal and IoT devices to rethink microphones as a multi-purpose sensor for understanding conversation and the surrounding environment. This resulted in a proliferation of Voice Controllable Systems (VCS) around us. The increasing popularity of such systems is also prone to attracting miscreants, who often want to take advantage of the VCS without the knowledge of the user. Consequently, understanding the robustness of VCS, especially under adversarial attacks, has become an important research topic. Although there exists some previous work on audio adversarial attacks, their scopes are limited to embedding the attacks onto pre-recorded music clips, which when played through speakers cause VCS to misbehave. As an attack-audio needs to be played, the occurrence of this type of attacks can be suspected by a human listener. In this paper, we focus on audio-based Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, which is unexplored in the literature. Contrary to previous work, we show that adversarial audio attacks in real-time and overthe-air are possible, while a user interacts with VCS. We show that the attacks are effective regardless of the user's command and interaction timings. In this paper, we present a first-of-itskind imperceptible and always-on universal audio perturbation technique that enables such DoS attack to be successful. We thoroughly evaluate the performance of the attacking scheme across (i) two learning tasks, (ii) two model architectures and (iii) three datasets. We demonstrate that the attack can introduce as high as 78% error rate in audio recognition tasks.

We report results from a pilot study that focuses mainly on understanding the everyday life quality of patients suffering from multiple sclerosis through the lens of connected Nokia Health devices. Our dataset comprises of 198 individuals (184 females and 14 males) and the study lasted over six months. By analyzing carefully crafted user-studies and correlating with personal sensor data collected with Nokia devices, we found that the level of fatigue is one of the main sources of discomfort across the majority of the patients. We further perform an exploratory analysis, which provides an early indication that by actively monitoring and perturbing users' daily activity levels, such as increasing daily step-counts, sleep duration and decreasing body weight, patients can potentially reduce their daily fatigue level.