Ph.D. Student

KOVAN Research Lab.
Department of Computer Engineering
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

I am a researcher / computer scientist / roboticist in KOVAN Research Lab. I am currently working on cognitive robotics, especially the developmental approach, through which we hope to grow our baby robot iCub. I am specifically interested in the cognitive and neurological bases of language, and developmental perception. I enjoy reading cognitive neuroscience literature (especially on language, but as well on low-level vision, attention and memory). Being raised as a computer scientist in the first place, I cherish the formal theory of computation. I am fascinated by the process of "compilation" and compilers (here is one I wrote), I enjoy coding (especially in python, though, and preferably when I am not in a hurry), and I love the output of computer graphics (meaning that I would rather prefer a fully-functional simulator or Ice Age to openGL/ODE in bare-bones). As a researcher, I respect whatever can be grounded on mathematics and statistics; as a human, I love everything related to language (have a look at this page to see exactly how much).