Sina Ghorbani Kolahi

Sina Ghorbani Kolahi is a PhD candidate in Human Media Interaction at UTwente, funded by NWA project Loneliness - Building 4 Belonging. In his PhD, Sina will develop spatio-temporal and deep learning models to examine how high-school students’ social behaviors and physical activity change over time and across contexts. To this end, he will take a multimodal approach, combining smartwatch data with in-the-moment pop-up questionnaires to capture not only what students do, but also how they feel in real-time, and make sense of their daily interactions.

Sina’s expertise lies at the intersection of machine learning, multimodal sensing, and well-being. Previously, during his master’s in Health Systems Engineering at Tarbiat Modares University (Iran), he worked on deep-learning methods for medical image analysis to strengthen diagnostic pipelines, an experience that solidified both his technical foundation and his commitment to real-world impact. He has remained actively involved in the research community, publishing in leading machine learning venues such as WACV, MICCAI, and BMVC. Motivated by this background, Sina is driven by the belief that responsibly designed sensing and machine learning can help educators and students better understand patterns of connection, stress, activity, and belonging.

E-mail: sina.ghorbanikolahi@utwente.nl

ORCID: 0009-0002-4519-2635