Who am I?

I am a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of Locomation, a provider of safe and reliable automated driving technology for ground transportation industry. Prior to Locomation, I was a Special Faculty / Commercialization Specialist at the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I'd started working as a Senior Robotics Engineer. For more information, you can review my resume.

Prior to that, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I had been leading the efforts on building intuitive and expressive interfaces to interact with semi-autonomous robotic systems that are intended to assist elderly and disabled.

Before joining the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. My primary affiliation was with the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) as a member of the Tartan Rescue Team working on the CHIMP robot for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. I was also affiliated with the Personal Robotics Lab, leading the Assistive Dexterous Arm (ADA) project in the assistive robotics domain.

I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Engineering at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2014. My thesis work contributed a case-based mobile manipulation framework. I was supervised by Prof. H. Levent Akin from Boğaziçi University and Prof. Manuela Veloso from Carnegie Mellon University.

From July 2011 to January 2012, I was a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, working under the supervision of Prof. Manuela Veloso as a member of the CORAL research group.

I got my MSCS degree from the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and my BS degree from the Department of Computer Engineering at Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey.

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Miscellaneous