A foundation model for electrodermal activity data

Jan 1, 2026·
Leonardo Alchieri
,
Matteo Garzon
Lidia Alecci
Francesco Bombassei De Bona
Martin Gjoreski
Giovanni De Felice
Silvia Santini
· 0 min read
Type
Publication
CoRR
publications
Leonardo Alchieri
Authors
Leonardo Alchieri
PhD Student
Leonardo Alchieri is a PhD student at the Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), supervised by Prof. Silvia Santini. His research pursues machine learning for affective, wearable, and ubiquitous computing, with a focus on personal health.
Lidia Alecci
Authors
Lidia Alecci
PhD Student
Lidia Alecci is a PhD student at the Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). Her research uses wearable devices for sleep monitoring, personal health, and much more.
Francesco Bombassei De Bona
Authors
Francesco Bombassei De Bona
PhD Student
Francesco Bombassei De Bona is a PhD student at the Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). His research aims to create multimodal and interactive explainable-AI tools for machine-learning models using wearable sensor data, to develop privacy-aware ML techniques, and to integrate both aspects into a unified approach.
Martin Gjoreski
Authors
Martin Gjoreski
Postdoc

Martin Gjoreski is an Ambizione Fellow supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and a Scientific Collaborator at the People-Centered Computing Lab, within the Faculty of Informatics at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). His primary research areas are artificial intelligence — specifically machine learning, federated learning, and explainable AI (XAI) — applied to wearable computing, affective computing, and digital healthcare.

Education & recognition

Martin earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia under the supervision of Profs. Matjaž Gams and Mitja Luštrek. His doctoral thesis received the Jožef Stefan golden emblem, awarded to outstanding PhD theses in Slovenia. In 2021 he was included in the list of the top 2% scientists in the world for single-year impact.

Professional service

  • Associate Editor, ACM IMWUT (Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies)
  • Board Member, Global SNSF Fellows Network
Giovanni De Felice
Authors
Giovanni De Felice
Postdoc

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Informatics at the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland, where I work in Prof. Silvia Santini and Prof. Marc Langheinrich’s group. I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Liverpool (UK) and a Master’s degree in experimental particle physics from the University of Pisa (IT), having conducted my thesis work within the Mu2e experiment at Fermi National Laboratory (US).

My research centers on interpretability-by-design: building deep learning models whose reasoning is interpretable by construction rather than explained after training, which makes them steerable and verifiable. To this end, I work on standardizing the underlying theory and code interfaces and on adding structure to the interpretable intermediate space.

Among data modalities, I focus particularly on time series, including forecasting, classification, representation learning, and virtual sensing, which I study through problems in the natural sciences and physiological signals. I am also a co-creator of the open-source machine learning library PyTorch Concepts.

Silvia Santini
Authors
Silvia Santini
Professor
Silvia Santini is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Informatics of USI since September 2016, where she co-leads the People-Centered Computing Lab together with Prof. Marc Langheinrich. From July 2014 until August 2016 she held an Associate Professor position at TU Dresden, where she led the Embedded Systems Lab. From October 2011 until July 2014 she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of TU Darmstadt, Germany, where she led the Wireless Sensor Networks Lab. From 2009 until 2011 she was a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Friedemann Mattern’s Distributed Systems Group at ETH Zurich, and from November 2010 until February 2011 she joined Leonidas Guibas’s research group at Stanford University as a visiting scholar. Silvia completed her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Friedemann Mattern at ETH Zurich in 2009, and graduated in Telecommunication Engineering (with honors) from the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, in May 2004.