CV

Research Scientist, Multimodal Language Department

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Research on multimodal communication and behaviour, including representation learning, analysis, and generation.

• Leads the Multimodal Modelling Cluster.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Dialogue Modeling Group

University of Amsterdam, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)

Research on face-to-face dialogue modelling, co-speech gesture segmentation and representation, and multimodal speech-gesture alignment.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Cognitive Systems Group

Maastricht University, Department of Advanced Computing Sciences

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

• Work package leader for the EU H2020 ProCare4Life project.

Doctoral Researcher, Cognitive Systems Group

Maastricht University

Research on affective computing and machine learning, with a focus on multimodal audio-visual emotion recognition.

• Co-represented Maastricht University tasks in the EU H2020 MaTHiSiS project.

Research Assistant

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

Research on computer vision and HCI, including face recognition, tracking, and retrieval of faces across age.

Research Intern

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), CVHCI Lab

Built and annotated the Accio dataset for face track retrieval in movies (Harry Potter).

• Revisited the lab in Summer 2015 for 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 thesis: Face Track Retrieval and Recognition Across Age

B.Sc.

Istanbul Technical University

Computer Engineering

• Graduated with honors.
• {“Bachelor thesis”=>”An Energy-Efficient Routing Technique and Implementation in Wireless Sensor Networks.”}

NWO Open Competition Domain Science (XS)

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), The Netherlands

Amount: To be added

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

Donders Research Stimulation Fund

Donders Institute, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Amount: To be added

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

Scholarships (Yemen & Turkey Ministries of Higher Education)

Yemen & Turkey Ministries of Higher Education

Amount: Approx. USD 60,000 total

Scholarships supporting B.Sc. and M.Sc. studies.

Internship Grant, Istanbul Technical University (KIT Visit)

Istanbul Technical University

Amount: To be added

Grant supporting a summer research internship at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.

Nomination for Best Paper Award (IJCB)

International Joint Conference on Biometrics

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

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

International Conference on Biometrics

Graduated in the Top 0.2% Nationwide (High School), Yemen

National ranking, Yemen

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

Utrecht University (NLP@U)

Invited talk.

Learning Representations in Dialogue Through Contrastive Learning

SignLab Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam

Invited talk.

Understanding and Modelling Multimodal Dialogue Coordination

Tilburg University

Invited talk.