Short Bio

I am originally from Istanbul, Turkey. Before NYU, I was at Bogazici University where I received my BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering. During the first three years of my PhD studies, I worked on long range robot vision problems under the supervision of Prof. Yann LeCun. From May 2008 until December 2009, I took a break from New York City and moved to Germany as a Max Planck Society Fellow. At the Department Schoelkopf in Tuebingen, I advanced my thesis research on novel semi-supervised learning algorithms with Dr. Yasemin Altun. I came back to the US in early 2010, and joined the startup world after receiving my PhD degree. Since Twitter acquired our company in September 2011, I have been working on exciting problems in social media networks.

Research Interests

• Machine Learning: Semi-Supervised Learning, Structured Output Prediction
  
• Autonomous Robots: Long-Range Vision, Self-Supervised Learning
  

Contact

• Email: naz dot erkan at gmail dot com

Publications

• Learning Probabilistic Discriminative Models of Grasp Affordances under Limited Supervision
  A. Naz Erkan, Oliver Kroemer, Renaud Detry, Yasemin Altun, Justus Piater, Jan Peters, International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2010


• Semi-supervised Remote Sensing Image Classification via Maximum Entropy
  A. Naz Erkan, Gustavo Cammps-Valls, Yasemin Altun, MLSP Workshop, 2010


• Semi-supervised Learning via Generalized Maximum Entropy
  A. Naz Erkan, Yasemin Altun AI & Statistics (AISTATS), 2010


• Large Scale Manifold Transduction
  M. Karlen, J. Weston, A. Erkan, and R. Collobert, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2008


• Deep Belief Net Learning in a Long-Range Vision System for Autonomous Off-Road Driving
  R. Hadsell, A. Erkan, P. Sermanet, M. Scoffier, U. Muller, Y. LeCun, Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2008


• Adaptive Long Range Vision in Unstructured Terrain
  A. Erkan, R. Hadsell, P. Sermanet, J. Ben, U.Muller, Y. LeCun, Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2007


• A Multi Range Vision Strategy for Autonomous Off Road Navigation
  R. Hadsell, A. Erkan, P. Sermanet, J. Ben, K. Kavukcuoglu, U. Muller, Y. LeCun, IASTED International Conference on Robotics and Applications (RA) 2007.


• Speed Range Dilemmas for Vision Based Navigation in Unstructured Terrain
  P. Sermanet, R. Hadsell, J. Ben, A. Erkan, B. Flepp, U. Muller, Y. LeCun, Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV) 2007.


• Online Learning for Off Road Robots: Using Spatial Label Propagation to Learn Long Range Traversability
  R. Hadsell, P. Sermanet, J. Ben, A. Erkan, J. Han, B. Flepp, U. Muller,Y. LeCun, Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2007.

Earlier Work

• Model Based Three Dimensional Hand Posture Recognition for Hand Tracking
  A. Naz Erkan, Master's Thesis, Bogazici University, 2004
• Real Time Hand Tracking and 3D Gesture Recognition for Interactive Interfaces Using HMM
  Cem Keskin, A. Naz Erkan, Lale Akarun, ICANN/ICONIP, Istanbul, June 2003
• Arayuzler icin Gercek Zamanli El Izleme Ve HMM Tabanli Uc Boyutlu Hareket Tanima
  A. Naz Erkan, Cem Keskin, Lale Akarun, SIU, Istanbul, 2003 (in Turkish)

Summer Schools and Invited Symposia

• Google Grad CS Forum 2010
  Invited speaker, Mountain View, CA, January 2010
  
• Grace Hopper Conference
  San Diego, CA, October 2006
  
• CIAR Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception Summer School
  Click here for a list of participants. Toronto, Canada, July 2005
  
• Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS'05)
  Click here for photos. Chicago, IL, May 2005