About

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at SCI, University of Pittsburgh. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Adriana Kovashka. Before starting my Ph.D. study, I worked at JotForm, a San Francisco-based SaaS provider, as a Software Engineer for nearly two years. I received my B.Sc. degree in Computer Science and Engineering with high honors from Hacettepe University, Turkey. I was an undergraduate researcher at HUCVL during my senior year under co-supervisions of Prof. Aykut Erdem and Prof. Erkut Erdem. My board research interests are Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Crowdsourcing. More specifically, I am currently working on context-aware object detection.

Publications

TasvirEt: A Benchmark Dataset for Automatic Turkish Description Generation from Images Mesut Erhan Unal, Begum Citamak, Semih Yagcioglu, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem, Nazli Ikizler Cinbis, Ruket Cakici
24th IEEE Conference on Signal Processing and Communications Applications, Zonguldak, Turkey, May 2016 [Full-text in Turkish]

Honors and Awards

Alper Atalay Best Student Paper Award (First Prize) 24th IEEE Conference on Signal Processing and Communications Applications, Zonguldak, Turkey, May 2016
Undergraduate Research Scholarship Scholarship awarded during my senior year by TUBITAK for being contributed in a research project.

Teaching (S20)

CS1502 - Formal Methods in Computer Science (TA) Office Hours: T Th 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM @ SENSQ 6501
CS1511 - Theory of Computation (TA) Office Hours: M 2:30 PM - 5:30 PM @ SENSQ 6501

My Erdös number is 4 (via 1. Arun Kumar Jagota, 2. Marcello Pelillo, 3. Aykut Erdem)