Profile

Wiebke is a research scientist working on ethical and trustworthy AI. She holds a Ph.D. (cum laude) from the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Prior to joining Sony AI, Wiebke completed her Masters in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and worked as a data scientist and engineer in the energy sector. Wiebke received a Mozilla Technology Fund Award to support her work on fairness in voice technologies. She is a fellow of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Young Researchers, the Data Science for Social Good Initiative and the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute.

Message

“Technology is conceived in the imagination of people. When we imagine a future with AI, it should make our lives richer and more colourful. At Sony AI, I help to create a future where speech, audio and language AI captures the full diversity of human voices. My research focuses on ethical dataset curation, evaluation and best practices for developing trustworthy speech, audio and language technologies. I also study the limitations of AI systems once deployed to anticipate risks, mitigate harms and ensure they align with societal values.”

Publications

Not My Voice! A Taxonomy of Ethical and Safety Harms of Speech Generators

FaccT, 2024
Wiebke Hutiri*, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Alice Xiang

The rapid and wide-scale adoption of AI to generate human speech poses a range of significant ethical and safety risks to society that need to be addressed. For example, a growing number of speech generation incidents are associated with swatting attacks in the United States…