Academic staff

Get to know members of the academic staff of Artificial Intelligence.

Heysem Kaya

Heysem Kaya completed his PhD thesis on computational paralinguistics and multimodal affective computing at Computer Engineering Department, Bogaziçi University in 2015. He has published over 75 papers (1.8K citations, h-index=26) in international journals and conference proceedings. His works won six Computational Paralinguistics Challenge (ComParE) Awards at INTERSPEECH conferences between 2014 and 2020; as well as three ChaLearn Challenge Awards on video-based personality trait recognition (ICPR 2016) and explainable computer vision & job candidate screening (CVPR 2017) competitions. His team was the first runner up in video-based emotion recognition in the wild challenge (EmotiW 2015 at ICMI). His research interests include mixture model selection, speech processing, computational paralinguistics and affective computing. He serves in editorial board of three journals and as reviewer in more than 25 journals in his field.

Pinar Yolum

Pinar Yolum is teaching Intelligent Agents. She holds a PhD degree from North Carolina State University. She is doing research in multiagent systems, especially on aspects on trust, commitments, and privacy. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Journal of AI Research, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, and IEEE Internet Computing.  She was an elected board member of International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) from 2010 to 2016.  She served as the Program Co-Chair of International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) in 2011 and as general co-chair in 2015.  She is one of the   25 inaugural members of North Carolina State University, Computer   Science Department Alumni Hall of Fame.  She is a member of the Hybrid Intelligence Center, a 10-year Gravitation Project that aims to design systems that combine human and machine intelligence. She contributes to promote women participation in computer science.

Natasha Alechina

Natasha Alechina is an Associate Professor at the Department of Informatica and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University. She obtained her undergraduate degree in logic from Moscow State University and her PhD from the Department of Mathematics and Theoretical Informatics of the University of Amsterdam. For many years she was in the UK, at Computer Science department of the University of Birmingham and later of the University of Nottingham, working on applications of logic in computer science and artificial intelligence. Her current research spans several areas of Artificial Intelligence, focusing on ensuring safety of AI systems: using logic for specifying rewards and constraints in reinforcement learning, synthesis of strategies for teams of robots, synthesis of norms for multi-agent systems, assigning responsibility in teams of human and AI agents, and algorithms for verification of quantitative properties in multi-agent systems. She has published over 100 papers in top international venues.