Speakers

Keynote Speakers

Shimon Ullman (MIT & Weizmann Institute)

Suresh Manandhar (The University of York)



Invited Speakers

Deniz Yüret (Koç University)

Cem Bozşahin (Middle East Technical University - METU)

Levent Akın (Bogaziçi University)

Michelle Adams (Bilkent University)

Speaker Biographies

Shimon Ullman

Shimon Ullman is the Samy and Ruth Cohn Professor of Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Prior to this position, he was a Professor at the Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT. His areas of research combine computer and human vision, human cognition, and brain modeling. He obtained his B.Sc. in Mathematics, Physics and Biology, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a recipient of the 2008 David. E. Rumelhart Prize in human cognition, the 2014 Emet Prize for Art, Science and Culture, and the 2015 Israel Prize in Computer Science. He is a member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Suresh Manandhar

Dr Suresh Manandhar is Reader in Computer Science and Head of Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the University of York. He received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1994 and a MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Essex in 1987. His research interests are in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computational Logics and Artificial Intelligence. Over the past 15 years, he has worked primarily in unsupervised learning of Natural Language and applications of deep learning. He has published over 120 peer reviewed papers and successfully supervised 15 PhD students and several Postdoctoral researchers. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering and the Journal of Applied Intelligence.

Deniz Yüret

Deniz Yuret is an associate professor of Computer Engineering at Koç University in Istanbul since 2002 currently heading the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Previously he was at the MIT AI Lab (1988-1999) and later co-founded Inquira, Inc., a company commercializing question answering technology (2000-2002). He has worked on supervised and unsupervised approaches to syntax, morphology, lexical semantics and lexical categories. His most recent work is on creation and applications of continuous word embeddings and developing systems that learn how to pair language with other modalities/tasks.

Cem Bozşahin

Cem Bozsahin works on the learning and projection of structure, in particular argument structure and constituent structure, in the intersecting areas of computer science, linguistics and philosophy. He holds a PhD in computer science, from Arizona State University. He worked at Ohio University before joining Middle East Technical University (ODTU) permanently, with visiting research assignments at University of Edinburgh, Bogazici University and University of Lisbon.

Levent Akın

H. Levent Akın received his Ph.D. degree in Nuclear Engineering from Boğaziçi University in 1984 and he has been a professor in the Department of Computer Engineering, Boğaziçi University since 1989. He is the director of Artificial Intelligence Lab and the founder of the Robotics Group. He is a Trustee of RoboCup Federation. He is the chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Turkey Chapter. His research interests include artificial intelligence, autonomous robots, and computational intelligence and he has published more than 190 papers on these topics.

Michelle Adams

Dr. Adams received her PhD in Neuroscience in 2001 from the New York University - Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Her PhD work focused on the relationship among brain aging, cognitive decline, estrogen, and glutamate receptors. Dr. Adams did a postdoctoral fellowship at the HHMI in Brown/MIT examining the functional consequences of altering glutamate receptor levels and then in 2004 she went to the Neurobiology and Anatomy Department at Wake Forest University School of Medicine to study the effects of caloric restriction on synaptic glutamate receptors. In 2005 Dr. Adams became an assistant professor at Wake Forest University and then in 2009 she moved to Bilkent University where she is currently an associate professor in the Psychology Department and director of the interdisciplinary graduate program in Neuroscience.