
The broad goal of my research is to explore better ways to understand, interpret and manipulate visual data*. My research interests span a diverse set of topics, ranging from image editing to visual saliency estimation, and to multimodal learning for integrated vision and language.
I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Koç University. I’m also affiliated with KUIS AI Center. Before joining Koç University, I was with Hacettepe University, where I was one of the directors of the Computer Vision Lab. I received my PhD degree from the Computer Engineering Department of METU in 2008. During my PhD studies, I spent a summer at Virginia Tech as a visiting researcher, and a semester at MIT as a visiting scholar. I did my postdoc at Ca’Foscari University of Venice in Italy.
I'm looking for motivated MSc/PhD students. Also, don't hesitate to contact me, if you're an undergrad wanting to get into AI and has a desire to learn!
Feb 2022 | Our work on omnidirectional image quality assessment got accepted to ICASSP 2023. |
Nov 2022 | We ranked 2nd in the euphemism detection shared task organized by the Figurative Language Processing workshop at EMNLP 2022. |
Sep 2022 | Our work on language-guided video manipulation accepted to BMVC 2022. |
Jun 2022 | Our work on language-guided image analysis received the best paper award at 5th Multimodal Learning and Applications Workshop. |
Feb 2022 | I was appointed to an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (IEEE-TIP). |
Oct 2021 | Our work on low-light image enhancement has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. Read more at our project website |
Aug 2021 | Our paper on multimodal procedural reasoning is accepted to ICCV 2021: "SLAMP: Stochastic Latent Appearance and Motion Prediction". Read more about our paper at our project website. |
Apr 2021 | I have been awarded the distinguished the 2021 Young Scientist Award (BAGEP 2021) by the Science Academy in Computer Engineering category. |
Jan 2021 | I will be teaching a new graduate-level course: COMP547 Deep Unsupervised Learning. |
Nov 2020 | I received a gift fund from Adobe Research to work on learning-based approaches for editing indoor scenes. I will be collaborating with Duygu Ceylan of Adobe Research, Erkut Erdem and Deniz Yuret of KUIS AI LAB in this exciting project. Thanks Adobe! |
Sep 2020 | I moved to Koç University as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering. I am also affiliated with KUIS AI Lab. |
May 2020 | Our recent ACM TOG paper on manipulating transient attributes of natural scenes was featured on Two Minute Papers. |
Jan 2020 | Our joint work with the Cognition, Learning and Robotics (CoLoRs) lab at Bogazici University on reasoning about action effects on articulated multi-part objects has been accepted to ICRA 2020. |
Principal Investigator | TUBITAK 1001 The Support Program for Scientific and Technological Research Projects Award #120E501, 2021-2024 · project page |
TUBITAK 1003 Primary Subjects R&D Funding Program Award# 116E685, 2017-2020 · project page | |
TUBITAK 3501 Career Development Program Award #113E497, 2014-2017 · project page | |
Co-Investigator | TUBITAK 1007 Public Institutions Research Funding Program Award #114G028, 2016-2019 · project page |
TUBITAK 1001 The Support Program for Scientific and Technological Research Projects Award #113E116 and European Union under European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Programme: ICT COST IC1037 Action, 2014-2017 · project page | |
TUBITAK 3501 Career Development Program: Award #112E146, 2012-2015 · project page | |
Donations | NVIDIA Hardware Donation Grant (Tesla K40 GPU), 2016 |
Selected Publications

Burst Photography for Learning to Enhance Extremely Dark Images
Ahmet Serdar Karadeniz, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, November 2021.
pdf · project page (with code)

SLAMP: Stochastic Latent Appearance and Motion Prediction
Adil Kaan Akan, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem, Fatma Guney
ICCV 2021.
pdf · project page (with code)

mustGAN: multi-stream Generative Adversarial Networks for MR Image Synthesis
Mahmut Yurt, Salman UH Dar, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem, Kader K. Oguz, Tolga Cukur
Medical Image Analysis, Vol. 70, May 2021.
pdf

Cross-lingual Visual Pre-training for Multimodal Machine Translation
Ozan Caglayan, Menekse Kuyu, Mustafa Sercan Amac, Pranava Madhyastha, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem, Lucia Specia
EACL 2021.
pdf · project page (with data and code)

Belief Regulated Dual Propagation Nets for Learning Action Effects on Articulated Multi-Part Objects
Ahmet E. Tekden, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem, Mert Imre, M. Yunus Seker and Emre Ugur
ICRA 2020.
pdf · video

Manipulating Attributes of Natural Scenes via Hallucination
Levent Karacan, Zeynep Akata, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem
ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 39, Issue 1, Article 7, February 2020.
pdf · project page (with data and code) · two minute papers

Procedural Reasoning Networks for Understanding Multimodal Procedures
Mustafa Sercan Amac, Semih Yagcioglu, Aykut Erdem, and Erkut Erdem
CoNLL 2019
pdf · project pages (with code)

Image Synthesis in Multi-Contrast MRI with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Salman Ul Hassan Dar, Mahmut Yurt, Levent Karacan, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem, Tolga Çukur
IEEE Trans. Med. Imag., Vol. 38, Issue 10, pp. 2375-2388, October 2019.
pdf

RecipeQA: A Challenge Dataset for Multimodal Comprehension of Cooking Recipes
Semih Yagcioglu, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem, and Nazli Ikizler-Cinbis
EMNLP 2018
pdf · project pages (with data and leaderboard)

Spatio-Temporal Saliency Networks for Dynamic Saliency Prediction
Cagdas Bak, Aysun Kocak, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem
IEEE Trans. Multimed., Vol. 20, Issue 7, pp. 1688-1698, July 2018.
pdf

Re-evaluating Automatic Metrics for Image Captioning
Mert Kilickaya, Aykut Erdem, Nazli Ikizler-Cinbis, and Erkut Erdem
EACL 2017
pdf · slides

Learning to Generate Images of Outdoor Scenes from Attributes and Semantic Layouts
Levent Karacan, Zeynep Akata, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem
arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.00215
pdf

Deformable Part-based Tracking by Coupled Global and Local Correlation Filters
Osman Akin, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem, Krystian Mikolajczyk
J Vis Commun Image Represent 2016
pdf

TasvirEt: A Benchmark Dataset for Automatic Turkish Description Generation from Images
Mesut Erhan Unal, Begum Citamak, Semih Yagcioglu, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem, Nazli Ikizler Cinbis, Ruket Cakici
SIU 2016
pdf (in Turkish) ·
project page ·
Turkish captions for Flickr8K dataset

An Objective Deghosting Quality Metric for HDR Images
Okan Tarhan Tursun, Ahmet Oguz Akyuz, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem
EG 2016
pdf ·
project page (with code) ·
experiment page

Image Matting with KL-Divergence Based Sparse Sampling
Levent Karacan, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem
ICCV 2015
pdf ·
supplementary material ·
project page (with code)

A Distributed Representation Based Query Expansion Approach for Image Captioning
Semih Yagcioglu, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem and Ruket Cakici
ACL 2015
pdf ·
supplementary material ·
project page (with code)

Predicting Memorability of Images Using Attention-driven Spatial Pooling and Image Semantics
Bora Celikkale, Aykut Erdem and Erkut Erdem
IMAVIS 2015
pdf ·
project page

The State of the Art in HDR Deghosting: A Survey and Evaluation
Okan Tarhan Tursun, Ahmet Oguz Akyuz, Aykut Erdem and Erkut Erdem
EG STAR 2015
pdf ·
project page

Top down saliency estimation via superpixel-based discriminative dictionaries
Aysun Kocak, Kemal Cizmeciler, Aykut Erdem and Erkut Erdem
BMVC 2014
pdf ·
extended abstract ·
supplementary material ·
project page (with code)

Structure-Preserving Image Smoothing via Region Covariances
Levent Karacan, Erkut Erdem and Aykut Erdem
SIGGRAPH Asia 2013
pdf ·
project page (with code)

Visual saliency estimation by nonlinearly integrating features using region covariances
Erkut Erdem and Aykut Erdem
JOV 2013
pdf ·
project page (with code)

Graph Transduction as a Non-Cooperative Game
Aykut Erdem and Marcello Pelillo
Neural Comput 2012
pdf ·
code
My Erdös number is 3 (via 1. Arun Kumar Jagota, 2. Marcello Pelillo)
Associate Professor
KUIS AI Lab
Department of Computer Engineering
Koç University
aerdem@ku.edu.tr
profile
@aykuterdemml
College of Engineering ENG Z12
Koç University
Rumelifeneri Yolu
Istanbul, Turkey TR-34450
+90 (212) 338-1173
Office hours: Wed 10am-11am
Curriculum vitae · all publications
Fall | COMP201 · COMP541 |
Spring | COMP201 · COMP527 |
28 May | ISBCS 2022 |
26 Sep | TS on RMM |
23 Nov | VECG |
17 Mar | KOLT |
4 Jun | ICASSP 2023 |
a curated list of resources for grad students
PhD studentsBurak Ercan
Ahmet Canberk Baykal
Osman Batur Ince
MSc students
Abdul Basit Anees
Burak Can Biner
Nafiseh Jabbari Tofighi
Suleyman Yildirim
Former Students
Aysun Kocak (PhD) 2023
Semih Yagcioglu (PhD) 2023
Kemal Cizmeciler (PhD) 2022
Bora Celikkale (PhD) 2020
Levent Karacan (PhD) 2019
Yasin Kavak (PhD) 2017
Osman Akin (PhD) 2016
Ahmet Canberk Baykal (MSc) 2022
Tayfun Ates (MSc) 2020
Ahmet Serdar Karadeniz (MSc) 2020
Emre Boran (MSc) 2020
Menekse Kuyu (MSc) 2020
Begum Citamak (MSc) 2020
Mehmet Gunel (MSc) 2018
Goksu Erdogan (MSc) 2018
Burcak Asal (MSc) 2017
Cagdas Bak (MSc) 2016
Mert Kilickaya (MSc) 2016
Tugrul Erdogan (MSc) 2015
Our research is made possible through generous support by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) and NVIDIA Corporation.
Page design courtesy of Michael Bernstein