Events

Date: 6 May 2026   Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Teams (contact organiser for link)

Title:
Behavioural signals for frictionless authentication: from controlled experiment to deployment

Speaker: Alexandra Uma, Zally (Alexandra is a past PhD student in Massimo's group)

Abstract:
Every interaction with a device leaves behind a trace of how a person moves, types, and behaves. At a fine-grained level, these patterns are surprisingly stable and person-dependent, not because people consciously maintain them, but because habitual behaviour, though contextual, is by its nature consistent. This talk describes work on using mobile phone sensor data for frictionless user authentication, and uses that as a starting point for a broader question: what does it mean to treat behaviour itself as a signal? This talk will cover what works under controlled conditions, what breaks in deployment, and what the failure modes reveal about the underlying cognitive phenomena.