CV

Research Scientist, Multimodal Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

• Research: multimodal communication and behaviour (representation learning, analysis, generation).
• Department role: leads the Multimodal Modelling Cluster.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Dialogue Modeling Group, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam

• Research: face-to-face dialogue modelling; co-speech gesture segmentation/representation; multimodal (speech–gesture) alignment.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Cognitive Systems Group, Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

• Research: explainable AI for emotion recognition; behavioural analysis in healthcare; self-supervised learning for sensor-based activity recognition.
• Leadership: work package leader (EU H2020 ProCare4Life).

Doctoral Researcher, Cognitive Systems Group, Maastricht University

• Research: affective computing and machine learning; multimodal (audio–visual) emotion recognition.
• Project role: co-represented Maastricht University tasks (EU H2020 MaTHiSiS).

Research Assistant, Smart Interaction and Machine Intelligence Technologies (SiMiT) Lab, Istanbul Technical University

• Research: computer vision and HCI; face recognition/tracking; retrieval of faces across age.

Research Intern, CVHCI Lab, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

• Built and annotated the Accio dataset for face track retrieval in movies (Harry Potter); revisited lab in Summer 2015 for thesis research.

Ph.D., Affective Computing and Machine Learning, Maastricht University

• Doctoral thesis: Bimodal Emotion Recognition Through Audio-Visual Cues

M.Sc., Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University

• Graduated with honors
• Master thesis: Face Track Retrieval and Recognition Across Age

B.Sc., Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University

• Graduated with honors
• Bachelor thesis: An Energy-Efficient Routing Technique and Implementation in Wireless Sensor Networks

NWO Open Competition Domain Science (XS)

• PI for the project titled: “Grounded Gesture Generation in Context: Object- and Interaction-Aware Generative AI Models of Language Use”.

Donders Research Stimulation Fund

• Co-applicant for the project with Sara Bögels (PI) and Iris Hendrickx on temporal dynamics of communicative effort reduction and alignment.

Scholarships (Yemen & Turkey Ministries of Higher Education)

• Scholarships supporting BSc/MSc studies (approx. USD 60,000 total).

Internship grant, Istanbul Technical University (KIT visit)

• Grant supporting summer research internship at KIT (Germany).

Nomination for Best Paper Award (IJCB)

• “Contrastive self-supervised learning for sensor-based human activity recognition”.

Ranked 1st, International Challenge on Biometric Recognition in the Wild (ICB-RW)

Graduated in the top 0.2% nationwide (high school), Yemen

Speech and Gesture Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue (analysis and generation)

• Utrecht University (NLP@U)

Learning representations in dialogue through contrastive learning

• SignLab Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam

Understanding and modelling multimodal dialogue coordination

• Tilburg University