About

Hello! I am a PhD Candidate (Comp. Sci.) at the Centre for Doctoral Training in AI and Music (AIM CDT) and the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), and also an Enrichment Student at the Alan Turing Institute.

My PhD focuses on ‘Composing Contemporary Classical Music using Generative Deep Learning’ under the supervision of Simon Colton to enhance human and machine creativity and enable new aesthetics.

I’ve worked at Sony and Bose as a Research Scientist Intern, and at Northwestern University Metamaterials and Nanophotonic Devices Lab as a Nanophotonics Researcher. I hold a BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey and a BM in Electronic Production and Design from Berklee College of Music, Boston, MA.

I’ve published at the top venues in the field such as AAAI, ICASSP, NeurIPS (workshops), ICLR (workshops), EvoMUSART, ICCC, IEEE MMSP and IEEE CAI, and in journals such as Machine Intelligence Research, Applied Physics Letters and Optical Materials Express. Also, I’ve contributed to a book chapter on Explainable AI for Arts and Music (to be published by Taylor & Francis).

My awards include the prestigious Enrichment Community Award (The Alan Turing Institute), Exceptional Great Work Award (Bose), Outstanding Students of 2022 (EvoMUSART), IEEE MMSP Top 10% Paper Award, UKRI CDT in AI and Music Scholarship (QMUL), Roland Award Endowed Scholarship (Berklee), Comprehensive (Full) Scholarship (Bilkent University) and Outstanding Success Scholarship (Turkish Educational Foundation, upon ranking 17th in 1.5 million people in national university entrance exam).

As a musician (drums and electronics), I’ve performed at venues such as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Harvard University Holden Chapel & Carpenter Center for Visual Arts (an original piece premiered as part of Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute), Berklee Performance Center, Wally’s Jazz Club Boston, Nardis Jazz Club Istanbul and Istanbul Jazz Festival.

My research interests include:

Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Generative AI, Optimisation, Computational Creativity, DL for Audio and Music, LLMs, Explainable AI, Out of Distribution Generation and Quality‐Diversity‐based Evaluation of Generative Models

An interesting fact :) - My academic family tree follows as Alan Bundy, Reuben Goodstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell!

For more info, please see my CV.