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.
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
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PhD in Electrical-Electronics Engineering from Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa (which was formerly part of Istanbul University).
My main research topics are machine learning, signal processing, probabilistic modeling, and computer vision. One research direction I am interested in is trustworthy machine learning via explainable AI and modeling/quantifying uncertainties. Some other keywords are Bayesian inference, probabilistic graphical models, subspace learning and sparse approximations, and image/video/audio processing. I am also interested in causal inference and Bayesian statistics (especially approximate inference, sampling, and likelihood-free inference) though I have a limited understanding in these.
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.
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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.
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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.
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