08 Oct 2020
IEEE Turkey Science Awards Winners
İTÜ Computer and Informatics Faculty member Prof. Dr. Hazım Kemal Ekenel and İTÜ Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Faculty member Assistant Prof. Dr. Semiha Tedik Basaran have been awarded with IEEE 2019 Turkey Science Award issued by IEEE Turkey Branch.
News: İTÜ Media and Communication Office
IEEE is the world’s largest professional organization with more than 430.000 members from 160 countries. The ‘Research Incentive Award’ is given by The IEEE Turkey Branch to a scientist who stands out with their scientific studies in their research areas, completed their doctorate in the last decade, has made an important part of their post-doctoral research in Turkey, and resident of Turkey. Prof. Dr. Hazım Kemal Ekenel, a member of ITU Computer and Informatics Faculty – Computer Engineering Department, was awarded with the ‘IEEE 2019 Turkey Research Incentive Award’ with his studies on ‘image processing, machine vision, pattern recognition and deep learning’ at the 3rd annual ceremony.
Prof. Dr. Ekenel made the following statements at the online award ceremony:
‘Thank you very much for being deemed worthy of this award. In the Smart Interaction and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SiMiT Lab) that we have established in ITU, we are researching computer vision, artificial learning, and, recently, deep learning, especially on human face analysis and other biometric features within the scope of national, international and industrial research projects. We focus on increasing the social interaction of people and make their lives easier with the smart systems we have developed using these technologies.’
Assistant Prof. Semiha Tedik Basaran, a member of ITU Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Faculty - Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, was awarded with the "2019 IEEE Turkey Doctoral Dissertation Award" with his doctoral thesis on "network coded transfer opportunities for wireless networks". He completed his doctoral thesis under the advisership of Prof. Dr. Güneş Karabulut Kurt.
Assistant Prof. Dr. Semiha Tedik Basaran presented his doctoral thesis after the award she received:
‘The title of my thesis was 'Relaying Opportunities for Wireless Networks by Applying Network Coding'. In this thesis, we have presented efficient resource usage schemes in terms of relay, power, and bandwidth using network coding for wireless networks to be used in homes, workplaces, and communication services where we will need more advanced infrastructures in the future. Accordingly, we have proposed a wide variety of transmission applications that could be used in next-generation wireless systems. In addition to these studies, we have obtained performance limits for generalized wireless systems using graph theory fundamentals. Thus, these performance limits can be used to increase the efficiency of the system during the design phase of wireless systems.’
About Prof. Dr. Hazım Kemal Ekenel
He received his undergraduate degree in 2001 and his master's degree in 2003 from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering of Boğaziçi University. Prof. Dr. Hazım Kemal Ekenel received his doctorate from Karlsruhe University (TH) Computer Engineering Department in 2009. He worked as a research group leader at this university between 2009-2011. Our faculty member started his duty at our university in our Computer Engineering Department in 2011.
Prof. Dr. Hazım Kemal Ekenel's research topics are based on deep learning, machine learning, image processing, computer vision, pattern, and object recognition. Facial modeling, especially facial recognition, has spread to a wide range of applications such as mood, age, gender, and health status extraction from facial images. Prof. Dr. Hazım Kemal Ekenel, also a highly cited academic, is the founder of ITU SiMiT Lab. The research he conducted at ITU SiMiT Lab are supported by national and international industrial funds.
Prof. Dr. Ekenel also stands out with the fact that he won the European Biometric Research Award in 2008 and was deemed worthy of 320,000 Euros of young researcher support by the German Research Council (DFG) within the scope of the German Excellence Initiative in 2010.
Our faculty member, who developed the best facial expression analysis systems in Europe, was accepted by the international technology evaluations at Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis Challenge 2011 and Emotion Recognition in the Wild Challenge 2013. He continued his success with his first place in the International Challenge on Biometric Recognition in the Wild competition held in 2016.
Prof. Dr. Ekenel also received the Science Heroes Association's Young Scientist of the Year Award in 2017, the Young Scientist Award in the Science Academy Young Scientists Award Program in 2018, and the Parlar Foundation Research Incentive Award.
For more information:
https://web.itu.edu.tr/ekenel/https://scholar.google.com.tr/citations?user=LfIDj68AAAAJ&hl=tr
About Assistant Prof. Dr. Semiha Tedik Basaran
Assistant Prof. Semiha Tedik Basaran completed his undergraduate degree from Istanbul Technical University Telecommunication Engineering Department in 2011 with second place, received her master's degrees in Electronics and Communication Engineering in 2013, and her doctorate in 2019 from the same department. She was a visiting researcher at RWTH Aachen University in 2017. After completing his doctorate, Assistant Prof. Dr. Başaran, who has worked on 5G and beyond cellular communication systems as an experienced researcher in Ericsson R&D, has been working as a faculty member at ITU Electronics and Communication Engineering Department since August 2020. He has articles published in prestigious journals and international patent applications in the field of wireless communication. His current research areas include Radio Access Networks, Mobility Management, Random Network Encoding, and Physical Layer Network Security.
Click to watch the live recording of the ceremony held on Youtube.