Outreach and Recognition

Invited Talks and Presentations

• May 2024: Visual Modeling of Human Behaviors: Multimodal, Interpretable, Grounded, and Self-Supervised Approaches at the Department of Data Science Advanced Computing, Maastricht University
• May 2024: Co-Speech Gesture Modelling at the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University
• April 2023: Visual Computing of Co-Speech Gestures, Research Presentation and Demonstration for Language in Interaction Consortium
• September 2022: Multimodal Emotion Recognition through Deep Learning, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), UvA
• April 2022: Human Emotion and Behaviour Analysis through Multimodal Learning at The Social AI Group Colloquium, VU Amsterdam
• October 2021: Skeleton-Based Explainable Bodily Expressed Emotion Recognition through Graph Convolutional Networks at the Cognitive Systems Group, Maastricht University
• September 2020: Joint Modeling of Audio-Visual Cues Using Attention Mechanisms for Emotion Recognition at the Smart Interaction and Machine Intelligence Technologies (SIMIT) Lab, Istanbul Technical University

Honors & Achievements

• Nomination for Best Paper Award (2021) at the IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2021). Our paper titled Contrastive self-supervised learning for sensor-based human activity recognition was nominated for best paper award at the 2021 IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2021). The paper was co-authored by Bulat Khaertdinov, Esam Ghaleb, and Stylianos Asteriadis.
• Ranked 1st in the International Challenge on Biometric Recognition in the Wild 2016 (ICB-RW) (2016)
• ITU Scholarship as Project Assistant within the Scope of the (CAMOMILE) Project (2013 - 2016)
• Received Scholarships Sponsored by the Ministries of Higher Education in both Yemen and Turkey, aimed at advancing the education of talented Yemeni students (2007 - 2013)
• Graduated in the Top 0.2% of High School Graduates Nationwide in Yemen (2006)

Public Outreach and Activities

Beyond my research contributions, I have actively engaged in academic citizenship and the popularization of AI:

• Participation in Events:
  • Pleasure Arts and Science Festival 2019: Demonstrated the biases of emotion recognition systems.
  • Maastricht University Open Bachelor and Master Days: Fostered next-generation interest in AI.
• Reviewing for Leading AI Journals and Conferences:
  • Journal of Pattern Recognition
  • International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
  • IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
  • Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
  • ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI)
  • IEEE Fcace and Gesture Recognition (FG)
  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
• Workshop Organization:
  • Co-organized the first workshop on AI and Sensor-Supported Integrated Care Solutions (ASSIST2021): An interdisciplinary event.
  • Committee Member, Workshop on Face and Gesture Analysis for COVID-19 (FG4COVID19)