Foteini Agrafioti spent the late 2000s collecting and analyzing heartbeat signals for her PhD project. Working from the University of Toronto’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology, she hoped to decode how to identify humans via their heartbeats, just like how other biometric features, from fingerprints to retina scans, are used to tell people apart.

“If you look at heartbeats by the naked eye, they more or less look the same,” she said. “Then we started using machine learning that uncovered unique patterns for every person hidden in the signals. We were able to prove that your heartbeat is effectively as unique as a fingerprint.”

Agrafioti’s PhD project was her first foray into machine learning, which revealed the “power of machine learning,” she said. “I fell in love with (the techn

See Full Page