Lidia Alecci
Profile
Education

PhD in Informatics

2021 to 2026 (expected completion: July 2026) at Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland

Thesis (provisional): Understanding and Mitigating the Impact of Interpersonal Variability on Machine Learning Models for Human Behavior Monitoring.
Supervisor: Prof. Silvia Santini

Master in Informatics - Double Degree

2019 to 2021 at Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland and Università Milano-Bicocca (UniMiB), Milan, Italy

Thesis: Robust recognition of sleep behavior using wearable sensors.
Supervisor: Prof. Silvia Santini, Co-supervisors: Prof. Francesca Gasparini and PhD candidate Shkurta Gashi
Grade: 110/110 cum laude

Bachelor Degree in Computer Science

2015 to 2018 at Università degli studi di Padova, Padova, Italy

Thesis: Development of a platform for managing contact lists. Curricular internship in Wintech.
Supervisor: Prof. Tullio Vardanega
Grade: 107/110

Experience

Visiting Scholar

From April 2025 to September 2025 at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA

I was awarded with the SNSF Mobility Grant to conduct a research visit in Prof. Thomas Ploetz's lab.

Roche Internships for Scientific Exchange (RiSE): Internship

From July 2022 to December 2022 at Roche, Basel, Switzerland

I developed a reproducible machine learning pipeline to predict a disease symptom (chorea in Huntington's disease) from raw motion sensor data. The work involved identifying the optimal level of feature abstraction and temporal integration, testing various ML algorithms, tuning hyperparameters, performing feature reduction, and assessing performance longitudinally. The clinical assessment was conducted longitudinally in a structured manner to minimize evaluator bias. This allowed the model to better capture the true likelihood of disease progression rather than merely learning patterns from potentially biased clinical evaluations. The results were presented as a poster at the 18th Annual Huntington's Disease Therapeutics Conference (Poster).

Wintech: Internship

From March 2018 to June 2018 at Wintech, Padova, Italy

During the internship, I developed three web applications, including an integrative interface for Active Campaign, a visitor entry/exit registry, and a support page for managing contacts. This involved studying technologies like Active Campaign, Hibernate, and DevExtreme, implementing functionality such as contact filtering, reporting campaign performance, and integrating various backend and frontend solutions.

Awards
  • Best Paper Award — Generative AI and Foundation Models for Human Sensing Workshop @ UbiComp 2025
  • SNSF Mobility Grant (2025)
  • 2nd Place — EMBC 2022 Workshop & Challenge on Detection of Stress and Mental Health Using Wearable Sensors
  • Scholarship from Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca for participation in the Double Degree Program with Università della Svizzera Italiana (2021)
  • Finalist — Italian Finals of the International Mathematical Games Championships (Milan, 16 May 2015)
  • Finalist — Italian Finals of the International Mathematical Games Championships (Milan, 10 May 2014)
Languages
  • English: C1
  • Italian: Mother tongue
  • French: A2.1
  • German: B1.1
Skills
  • Python: Expert
  • PyTorch: Expert
  • JAX: Intermediate
  • Java: Advanced
  • C++: Advanced
  • SQL: Intermediate
  • R: Intermediate
  • LateX: Advanced
  • Git: Advanced