CV

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, 2020–2024
- College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS, formerly SCSE); thesis: Towards Semantic, Debiased and Moment Video Retrieval with Multi-modal Features (defended Dec 2024)
- Supervised by Prof Joo-Hwee Lim, Dr Hongyuan Zhu and Prof Hanwang Zhang; supported by the A*STAR SINGA scholarship
M.Sc. in Electronics Engineering, Uludağ University, Türkiye, 2018
- Supervised by Prof Ahmet Emir Dirik; thesis on vehicle detection and make-model classification
B.Sc. in Electronics Engineering, Uludağ University, Türkiye, 2014
- Exchange semesters in Siena and Naples, Italy

Mar 2025 – Present: Research Scientist, Singapore Management University (SMU), Singapore
- Making vision-language models culturally aware, with reasoning across image, video, audio and text, starting with Southeast Asia; working with Prof Chong-Wah Ngo
Jan 2020 – Dec 2024: Doctoral Researcher (SINGA Scholar), Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R), A*STAR, Singapore
- Semantic, debiased and moment-level text-to-video retrieval with multi-modal features
Oct 2023 – Dec 2023: Visiting Researcher, MaVi Research Group, University of Bristol, UK
- Video corpus moment retrieval, with Dr Michael Wray in Dima Damen’s group
Feb 2019 – Sep 2019: Machine Learning Engineer, Turkish Technic (Turkish Airlines), İstanbul, Türkiye
Sep 2016 – Mar 2017: Software Engineer (Erasmus+ traineeship), University of Valencia, Spain
Dec 2014 – Sep 2015: Electronics Engineer, TSV Energy (start-up), Türkiye
Advisory: machine learning advisor to two award-winning start-ups in London and Istanbul

Joint 3rd Place, EPIC-Kitchens-100 Multi-Instance Retrieval Challenge, CVPR 2022
Finalist, Three Minute Thesis (3MT) @ NTU, representing CCDS, 2022
SINGA Ph.D. Scholarship, A*STAR, 2020–2024
Student Travel Award, European Neural Network Society (ICANN), 2018
Oral presentations at ICIP 2021, ICCV Workshop 2021, CVPR Workshop 2023 and ICANN 2018

Workshop Organizer, ICMR 2027 (details will be announced soon)
Registration Chair, SSNLP 2026
Judge, Singapore Science and Engineering Fair (SSEF) 2025
Programme Committee member & reviewer: AAAI 2026 and 2027, ACM MM 2026, ICANN 2019, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
Volunteer: ACM Web Conference 2024, NeurIPS 2021
Founder, Turquoise Dot — a meetup community for Turkish and Turkic researchers and tech professionals in Singapore (2025)
Summer schools: CIFAR DLRL 2022; PAISS 2021 (poster presentation)
Teaching and mentoring: see Teaching

Developing Research Skills: From Process to Paper — CCDS Graduate Students’ Club, NTU, Mar 2026
Seeing Culture — ResearchTrend.AI, Dec 2025

Conference presentations are listed under Talks.

Python, PyTorch; training and evaluating multimodal models at scale
Vision-language models, text-to-video retrieval, benchmark and dataset construction

Turkish (native), English (professional working proficiency), Italian & Spanish & Bahasa Indonesia (elementary)