Emanuele Maiorana
KEYNOTE
Towards Continuous User Authentication: Wearable Sensors for Biometric Recognition
Emanuele Maiorana
Roma Tre University, Italy
ABSTRACT
Wearable sensor, once niche tools for fitness tracking, are now emerging as powerful enablers of several applications. While most of them are associated to medical purposes, these devices can be exploited to implement novel paradigms in many fields, including biometric user recognition. Actually, as our digital lives become increasingly integrated with mobile and ubiquitous computing, the need for secure and seamless user authentication is more critical than ever. For instance, capabilities such as continuous user recognitions are highly needed in frameworks such as access control for services available in the metaverse. This keynote explores how physiological and behavioral biometric data captured passively by wearables can be leveraged to move beyond one-time authentication to persistent, context-aware identity verification.
Considering recent advancements in this field, we will examine how signals such as photoplethysmograms (PPG) and seismocardiograms (SCG) can serve as distinctive biometric markers, and how machine learning algorithms can transform raw sensor data into reliable authentication mechanisms. Alongside showcasing current breakthroughs and applications, this talk will also address critical challenges including data variability, privacy concerns, and real-world deployment constraints.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Emanuele Maiorana (Senior Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree from Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy, in 2009, with European Doctorate Label. He is currently an Assistant Professor (tenure track) with the Department of Industrial, Electronic, and Mechanical Engineering, Roma Tre University. His research interests include digital signal and image processing, with a specific emphasis on biometric recognition. He is the recipient of the Lockheed Martin Best Paper Award for the Poster Track at the IEEE Biometric Symposium 2007, the Honeywell Student Best Paper Award at the IEEE Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems conference 2008, and the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM). He was the General Chair of the 9th IEEE International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics (IWBF) in 2021, and of the 16th IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS) in 2024. He is the Chair of the IEEE Italy Section Biometrics Council Chapter. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security and IEEE Open Journal on Signal Processing.
