CV

Research Staff, Multimodal Language Department

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Research on multimodal communication and behaviour analysis and generation.

• Leading the Multimodal Modelling Cluster.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Dialogue Modelling Group

University of Amsterdam, Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation

Research on face-to-face dialogue modelling with a focus on co-speech gesture segmentation and representation.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Cognitive Systems Research Group

Maastricht University, Department of Advanced Computing Sciences

Research on explainable AI for emotion recognition, human behaviour analysis in healthcare, and self-supervised learning for sensor-based human activity recognition.

• Work package leader in the EU H2020 project ProCare4Life.

Doctoral Researcher, Cognitive Systems Research Group

Maastricht University

Research on affective computing and machine learning, focusing on multimodal emotion recognition.

• Represented Maastricht University in the EU H2020 project MaTHiSiS.

Research Assistant

Istanbul Technical University, Smart Interaction and Machine Intelligence Technologies Lab

Research on computer vision and human-computer interaction, with a focus on face recognition and tracking, and retrieval of faces across ages.

Research Intern

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Computer Vision for Human-Computer Interaction Lab

Collected and annotated the Accio dataset for face track retrieval in movies, using the Harry Potter series for the master’s thesis.

• Visited again in Summer 2015 for master’s thesis research.

Ph.D.

Maastricht University

Affective Computing and Machine Learning

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

M.Sc.

Istanbul Technical University

Computer Engineering

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

B.Sc.

Istanbul Technical University

Computer Engineering

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

Speech and Gesture Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue: From Representation to Generation

Joint Special Interest Group NLP@Utrecht

Invited talk.

Learning Representations in Dialogue through Contrastive Learning: An Intrinsic Evaluation

SignLab Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam

Invited talk.

Co-Speech Gesture Modelling: Representation and Segmentation

Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University

Invited talk.

Multimodal Emotion Recognition through Deep Learning

Computational Linguistics Seminar (CLS), Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam

Invited talk.

Human Emotion and Behaviour Analysis through Multimodal Learning

The Social AI Group Colloquium, VU Amsterdam

Invited talk.

Joint Modeling of Audio-Visual Cues Using Attention Mechanisms for Emotion Recognition

Smart Interaction and Machine Intelligence Technologies Lab, Istanbul Technical University

Invited talk.

NWO Open Competition Domain Science

Granted

Amount: 50,000 EURO

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

Donders Stimulation Fund Award

Granted

Amount: 10,000 EURO

Co-applicant for a project on how the temporal dynamics of communicative effort reduction mark qualitative linguistic alignment during interaction.

Scholarships from the Ministries of Higher Education in Yemen and Turkey

Granted

Amount: 60,000 USD

Scholarships for Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Engineering.

Internship grant awarded by ITU for summer internship at KIT

Granted

Amount: 10,000 USD

Grant supporting summer internship research at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Nomination for Best Paper Award

IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2021)

For the paper “Contrastive self-supervised learning for sensor-based human activity recognition”.

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

International Conference on Biometrics

Scholarship Recipient

Ministries of Higher Education in Yemen and Turkey

Awarded for academic excellence to advance the education of talented Yemeni students.

Top 0.2% of High School Graduates Nationwide, Yemen

National ranking, Yemen