About
I worked in industry for 10 years, as well as in universities and non-university research institutes, totaling more than 15 years of experience in AI, machine learning, computer vision, information retrieval, and signal processing.
My main research topics are machine learning, signal processing, probabilistic modeling, and computer vision. Currently focused on trustworthy machine learning, explainable AI, uncertainty calibration, robustness and efficiency in learning, as well as LLM and RAG pipelines. Some other keywords are subspace learning, sparse approximations, signal decomposition, and image/video/audio processing. I am also interested in Bayesian statistics and causal inference though I have a limited understanding in these.
Work Experience
- April 2025 - …: Postdoc @ Scuola Normale Superiore, part of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Lab.
- September 2023 - March 2025: Scientist @ Leibniz Institute ATB, Data Science in Bioeconomy Department & Understandable Machine Intelligence (UMI) Lab.. Focus: Explainable AI, trustworthy AI, AI applications in bioeconomy (mostly computer vision).
- April 2022 - March 2023: ERCIM ‘Alain Bensoussan’ Fellow @ Fraunhofer Institute for Mechatronic Systems Design (IEM), Trusted Machine Intelligence Group. This fellowship program is organized by European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. Focus: Explainable AI with an emphasis on post-hoc and counterfactual explanations for time series models.
- March 2014 - March 2022: Engineering Manager (in AI Research) & (Senior) Research Engineer & Team Leader & Project Manager @ Huawei Technologies Turkey R&D Center. Focus: Machine learning, computer vision, video processing, information retrieval, learning-to-rank, grant applications, patent applications, project management, technical team management, and people management.
- June 2012 - February 2014: Signal Processing Software Design Engineer @ Netaş Telecommunications. Focus: Embedded signal processing software for satellite navigation.
- July 2009 - May 2012: Researcher @ Multimedia Signal Processing and Pattern Recognition Lab. of Istanbul Technical University. Focus: Computer vision, image/video modeling, processing, classification, retrieval, fingerprinting, and copy detection.
Education
-
PhD in Electrical-Electronics Engineering from Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa (which was formerly part of Istanbul University).
During my PhD I worked on probabilistic models for spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Aydın Akan and Prof. Dr. Koray Kayabol. In this problem, a land cover segmentation map is obtained by pixel-wise classification. I developed several generative and discriminative classification models with non-stationary mixture models, random fields, deep learning, subspace learning, and optimization algorithms for machine learning.
-
MSc in Biomedical Engineering from Istanbul Technical University under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Bilge Günsel. My thesis was about tissue density classification in mammographic images using local features.
-
Bachelor’s in Electrical-Electronics Engineering from Istanbul University with an emphasis on telecommunications and signal processing. Graduation project was real-time music and audio effects on DSP.
Some links: