News

  • We are organizing the Context-Aware Student Engagement Detection (CASED) Challenge at ICMI this year. Development phase is until 25 May.
  • The 12th edition of the Int. Symposium on Brain and Cognitive Science (ISBCS) will be organized by TED University, 3 May 2026. The keynotes are Huseyin Boyaci (Bilkent Univ.), Peter Kok (UCL), Aylin Kuntay (Koc Univ.), and Lars Muckli (Univ. of Glasgow). Paper submissions are open until 12 April, and previously published work can be presented. Registration is free for all.
  • I will give a talk on "Big Data for Social Good: Mobile Phone Data for Migration and Mobility" at Koc University, CSS Seminar Series, 9 April 2026. Registration is free to follow it online.
  • Almila Akdag (Utrecht Univ.) ve Evrim Kavcar'la (Mimar Sinan Guzel Sanatlar Univ.) Bilim Akademisi'nin Sarkac platformunda yaptigimiz "Cay, Kahve, Bilim: Sanatta Yaraticilik ve Yapay Zeka" soylesisi YouTube'da yayinlandi.
  • BUMED ve Bogazici Akademisyenleri'nin duzenledigi "Dijital Cagda Akademik Ozgurlukler ve Bilgi Uretimi" panelinin videosu YouTube'da yayinlandi. Acilis konusmasini Murat Sevinç'in yaptigi, Evren Balta moderatörlüğündeki panelde Cem Say ve Gönenç Gürkaynak ile yapay zekânın akademiye etkilerini, hız baskısını, etik tartışmaları ve üniversitelerin kamusal rolünü konustuk.
  • I gave a talk on "Big data for social good" at IEEE Madras Section, on 25 November 2025.
  • I gave two talks on "Designing Computational Tools for Behavioral and Clinical Science;" the first at the Glasgow Workshop on Social AI, 26 September 2025, and the second at MRAC: Multimodal, Generative and Responsible Affective Computing Workshop at ACM Multimedia, 27 October 2025.
  • I have joined the ACM Distinguished Speaker program. If you would like to book a lecture through the program, ACM can cover part of the travel costs. The application process takes 1-2 months, so make sure you apply in time. Available lectures (all in English or Turkish) and the request form are here.
  • Our new NWA-ORC Project DECIDE: Democratizing AI – Empowering Citizens through Transparent Decision-making is granted. With about 7 million euros budget, this consortium will design new AI-systems as intelligence-enhancing-technologies for use by citizens.
  • Together with Dr. Leimin Tian, we gave a half-day tutorial at ACII 2025 (8-11 October 2025, Canberra) on Multimodal Behaviour Analysis for Interactive AI.
  • Our group's third PhD graduate was Hui Lu, who defended his thesis Efficiently moving forward in video-based human action recognition" on July 7. His last paper on improving the popular VideoMamba will be presented at ICCV this year (and an author proof is available on my pubs. page).
  • We are starting two new projects. The HAICu project is about multimodal analysis of archival media data. The second project is funded by NWO, and is on Responsible Scaling of Data-driven Approaches for Enhancing Mental Healthcare’.
  • We are establishing the Dutch chapter of the IEEE Biometrics Council. If you are interested in biometrics, forensics, identity science, and human behavior analysis, send me an e-mail to be included in the correspondence. IEEE membership is a plus, but not required.
  • I chair the Technical Committee 12 (Multimedia and Visual Information Systems) of IAPR. Please don't hesitate to send me an email if there is something the TC12 can do for you, or vice versa.
  • Türkiye'de veya yurtdışında hesaplamalı sosyal bilimler, insan hareketliliği, sosyal ağ analizi, sosyal sorunlar için yapay zeka konularında çalışan araştırmacıları biraraya getirmek için yeni bir liste kurduk: soc-comp-tr@googlegroups.com. Bu konularda çalışan herkesi katılmaya ve listeyi duyurmaya davet ediyoruz.
  • The closing workshop of the Data for Refugees (D4R) Challenge was held on 21 January 2019, at Bogazici University, Albert Long Hall. All project reports are available online. (If the link doesn't work, please try this one.)
  • The Turkish computer vision and pattern recognition community started an e-mail communication list, and the number of its members reached two hundred and fifty. The communication language is mainly Turkish. Look for "cvpr-news-tr@googlegroups.com". Please join in and spread the word.
  • You can download the slides for the Workshop on Teaching Style and Content for the training of teaching assistants. These are partly based (with much compression and simplification) on the material from the BKO certification program (webpage in Dutch), offered by the University of Amsterdam.
  • If you are interested in hearing about cognitive science related events in Turkey, please subscribe to our mailing list (moderated) cogsci-news-tr@googlegroups.com.
  • The UvA-NEMO Smile database went public! See the website for details on how to obtain it, and check here the coverage in the media. Learn more about our experiment on the effect of dynamic information for facial age and expression estimation here (in Dutch) and here (in English). The public report (in Dutch) can be downloaded here.