I am interested in developing autonomous robot systems. I founded the KOVAN Research Lab. in 2002 and have been its director since then. My research focused on the development and control of swarm robotic systems and on the learning of affordances and concepts in language in robots. In 2009 I was awarded a free 53-DOF iCub humanoid robot platform by the RobotCub project to support my research in cognitive robotics.

I received my PhD in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University in 2000, after getting my BSc and MSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University, and Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University in 1991 and 1995 respectively. Before assuming my current position, I worked as a Chief Scientist at the  Starlab Research Laboratories, Belgium, and as a post-doc at IRIDIA of Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, for the Swarm-bots project coordinated by Prof. Marco Dorigo.

Check some of my papers:

Learning Adjectives and Nouns from Affordances on the iCub Humanoid Robot. SAB'2012 Goal emulation and planning in perceptual space using learned affordances, RAS'2011. Self-Organized Flocking in Mobile Robot Swarms, SI'2008 To afford or not to afford: A new formalization of affordances towards affordance-based robot control. AB'2007. Swarm Robotics: From Sources of Inspiration to Domains of Application, LNCS'2005 Complete list of publications available here..

Edited books and special issues
2011	2010	2010	2008	2007	2005	2004

Selected projects:

Emergence of communication in RObots through Sensorimotor and Social Interaction	Emergence of communication in iCub	Affordance-based Development of Concepts and Tool Use in Humanoid Robots	Multi-sensory Autonomous Cognitive Systems	Controllable Swarm Robotic Systems