Welcome to the webpage of AURORA Lab
The Laboratory on Accessible, Universal, Responsible, Open and Reliable Artificial Intelligence
Principal Investigator
Duygu Ataman, Ph.D.
Duygu Ataman is an Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator at the Graduate School of Informatics at Middle East Technical University (METU), where she leads the AURORA Lab. Her research focuses on developing accessible, interpretable, efficient, and reliable artificial intelligence systems, with a particular emphasis on multilingual and multimodal machine intelligence, reasoning, representation learning, and cognitive modeling.
Prior to joining METU, she served as an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at New York University's Courant Institute and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Zürich. She received her Ph.D. in Neural Sequence Modeling and Machine Translation from the University of Trento (in collaboration with FBK), an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from KU Leuven, and a B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from METU. She is the founder of the ACL Special Interest Group on Turkic Languages (SIGTURK) and co-organizes the Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL) at EMNLP.
Post-doctoral Researchers
Dilek Kadioglu, Ph.D.
I am a postdoctoral researcher and a member of the project "UNI-LM: A Universal Framework for Language Modeling" in the Department of Cognitive Science at Middle East Technical University (METU). My current research within the AURORA Lab and the UNI-LM project focuses on theory of mind in relation to large language models. I have a background in philosophy (Ph.D., M.A., B.A. from METU) and an M.Sc. in Philosophy of Science from the London School of Economics (LSE). My research interests include philosophy of AI, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and logic.
Ph.D. Students
Ali Eren Cetintas
Having received a B.A. in Foreign Language Education from Boğaziçi University and an M.Sc. in Cognitive Science from METU, I am currently a Ph.D. student and Research Assistant in the Department of Cognitive Science at METU. My research areas include computational linguistics, natural language processing, and morphology in large language models.
Burcu Cinar
I am a Ph.D. candidate and research assistant in Cognitive Science at METU. With a background in software engineering, mathematics, and cognitive science, I work at the intersection of computer vision and multimodal AI. My research focuses on alignment between text and images in vision-language models.
Ibrahim Ethem Deveci
I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Cognitive Science at METU. My research focuses on integrating interactionist theories of reasoning with large language models through reinforcement learning, leveraging multi-agent argumentation to enhance reasoning capabilities.
Tugrul Gorgulu
I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Cognitive Science at METU. My research focuses on vision-language-action (VLA) models and their applications in robotics and embodied AI.
Melih Ozcan
I earned my B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from METU and am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at METU, specializing in control systems with research focused on robotic manipulation.
Baris Deniz Saglam
I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Information Systems at METU. My research focuses on post-training methods for language models, especially reinforcement learning for agentic tasks such as planning, retrieval, and tool use.
Master's Students
Esra Erdogan
I am a Master's student in Cognitive Science with a major in Foreign Language Education at METU. My research focuses on benchmarking AI-based conversational tutors for mathematics and evaluating pedagogical qualities such as scaffolding and adaptive guidance.
Asude Berra Kaya
Currently pursuing an M.Sc. in Cognitive Science at METU, I specialize in developing assistive robotic tools with AI applications for individuals with specific clinical needs. My background is in Psychology (Ankara University) with a minor in Philosophy.
Aleyna Korkmaz
I am a Master's student in Information Systems at METU. My current research focuses on video-language modeling for surveillance applications; previously I developed a web-based app to autonomously scan technology news using NLP techniques.
Bugra Metin
I am a Master's student in Cognitive Science at METU. My research studies the applicability of AI systems in psychotherapy, focusing on building an automated cognitive behavioral therapy framework.
Turgay Yildiz
I am a Master's student in Cognitive Science. My research aims to develop mechanistic insights into multimodal embodied AI systems by probing internal representations of vision-language-action models.
Undergraduate Students
Hilal Pamukcan
I am a third-year undergraduate student in Computer Engineering at METU. My work focuses on analyzing how modality information is encoded in the latent geometry of large language models.
Omer Simsek
I am a third-year Philosophy student at METU. My research centers on the epistemology of AI and how multi-agent systems can be used to explore scientific discovery.
Visiting Students
Zeynep Cahan
I am an undergraduate student in AI and Data Engineering at Ankara University. My research investigates reliable hallucination detection metrics for large language models and the design of evaluation metrics tailored to reasoning systems.
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