Emre Akbas, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Department of Computer Engineering
Middle East Technical University

Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü 
Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi
Çankaya / Ankara 06800 Turkey

emre at ceng.metu dot edu dot tr

+90 312 210 5522

Education

PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Supervised by Prof Narendra Ahuja, 2011
- Recipient of “Cognitive Science / AI Award” given by the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
MS, Middle East Technical University (METU), Department of Computer Engineering, Supervised by Prof Fatos Yarman Vural, 2006
- “Best thesis of the year award” by the Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences at METU.
BS, Middle East Technical University, Department of Computer Engineering, 2004
- Ranked 1st in the graduating class of 2004.
Ankara Fen Lisesi (Ankara High School of Science), 1999

Postdoctoral researcher at the Vision and Image Understanding Lab, UCSB. 2012-2015
Research assistant at the Computer Vision and Robotics Lab., Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, UIUC. 2006-2011
Research intern at the Vision Technology, Inc., Champaign, IL. Summer 2009
Teaching assistant at the Department of Computer Engineering, METU. 2004-2006
Research assistant at the Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Lab., Department of Computer Engineering, METU. 2004-2006
Software engineer at Informatics Institute, METU. 2003-2005
Software development intern at Software Research and Development Center, METU. Summer 2001

METU Thesis Of The Year (received it as the advisor of Nermin Samet’s thesis), Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, METU, 2023.
“Young Scientist Award” given by the Science Academy, Turkey. 2022
METU Thesis Of The Year (received it as the co-advisor of Kemal Oksuz’s thesis), Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, METU, 2022.
ODTÜ Parlar Vakfı Araştırma Teşvik Ödülü (Research Incentive Award). 2020
METU Thesis Of The Year (received it as the advisor of Muhammed Kocabas’s thesis), Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, METU, 2020.
Recipient of “Cognitive Science / AI Award” from the Beckman Institute. 2010
Research assistantship, sponsored by Prof. Narendra Ahuja, at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, UIUC. 2006-2011
M.S. thesis was given the “METU Thesis Of The Year” award by the Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences at METU. 2006
Ranked 1st in class, among 86 BS graduates of the Department of Computer Engineering. 2004
Listed in METU President’s High Honors List in all semesters. 2000-2006
Ranked within the top 0.04% out of 1.5 million candidates taking the national university entrance exam.

Reviewer for CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU).
Member of editorial board at Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
Co-organized the “CVPR2022 Tutorial on Performance Measures in Visual Detection and Their Optimization”, June 2022.
Co-organized the “ECCV2020 Workshop on Imbalance Problems in Computer Vision (IPCV)”, Aug 2020.

“Young Scientist Awards Program (BAGEP)”, Science Academy, Turkey. 2022-2023.
Beneficiary in the ERC Starting Grant NONWESTLIT, 2022.
AWS Cloud Credits for Research, 2019.
TUBITAK 3501 Career Development Grant. Project page. April 2018 - April 2021.
TUBITAK* Re-integration Fellowship (2232 Yurda Dönüş Araştırma Burs Programı). Jan 2016 - Jan 2018
Tesla K-40 GPU card donated by NVIDIA through the GPU Grant Program. Jan 2016

* TUBITAK: Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey