This thesis contributed to the edge computing literature by providing the first sectoral edge computing technology roadmap. It identifies how the focus of edge computing research changes by the application domain and objectives. Market and technology trends are discovered with dynamic topic modeling, using LDA and BERTopic methods. Technology roadmapping literature is extended by integrating data layer in a data-driven technology roadmap for social change and technology forecasting.

Date: 17.04.2023 / 13:00 Place: A-212

This study investigates pronominal anaphora in a Turkish and English translated TED corpus, the TED-MDB (Zeyrek et al., 2020), and provides a heuristic-based resolution mechanism for each language. The corpus comprises 364 English-Turkish sentences aligned. Research has two phases. The annotator annotated the data in the first phase. In the second phase, the knowledge poor method of Mitkov (1998) was tested on the Turkish and English annotated corpuses independently. TED presentations can identify pronominal anaphora with an F1-score of 0.61 in English and 0.63 in Turkish.

Date: 27.01.2023 / 15:00 Place: A-212

Among various Agile Software Development methods, Scrum is one of the most widely adopted one. The Scrum Guide clearly describes the Scrum events, artifacts, and roles. However, due to various project characteristics such as team size, team distribution, project domain, technology and requirement stability levels, Scrum practices need to be tailored. In this thesis, we analyze the various adaptations and tailoring choices of companies using Scrum. By incorporating evidence from literature and a survey study that is conducted among participants who use Scrum in their organizations, the impact of Scrum tailoring on technical debt will be analyzed.

Date: 24.01.2023 / 15:00 Place: B-116

This research evaluates the convergence of High-Performance Computing (HPC), Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Cloud Computing technologies using bibliometric analysis, including performance and network analysis. The results reveal a rapidly growing literature with a significant increase in research activities in recent years, identifying key trends and patterns in the literature, including top published authors, most productive institutions, cited articles, and influential publications. This thesis provides valuable insights by identifying the bibliometric trends across the concept of technological convergence of HPC-Big Data-AI-Cloud Computing technologies, which is important for both academia and industry.

Date: 24.01.2023 / 11:00 Place: A-212

Catastrophic forgetting is common in the connectionist models while learning from a sequence of tasks. This study aims to investigate different continual learning methods on face analysis tasks involving age estimation, gender recognition, emotion recognition, and face recognition.  We analyze face analysis in two stages, which is also very common in Artificial Neural Networks: face detection and face attributes analysis. Firstly, experiments for learning face detection and facial landmark detection are conducted by studying multitask learning. Secondly, some continual learning methods inspired by biological systems are leveraged to overcome catastrophic interference in artificial models.

Date: 26.01.2023 / 09:30 Place: B-116

The current thesis compares the communication breakdown repair strategies of adults with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD) and age- and education-matched healthy individuals. To create a discourse corpus, video recordings of ASD and control group members performing a joint task under two conditions—matched with the acquainted or the experimenter—were analyzed. This experimental setup creates a situation where participants instruct and follow each other to examine speech repair strategies and elaboration needs. The study's transcripts were content-analyzed, and participants' repair utterances were marked and statistically analyzed.

Date: 26.01.2023 / 14:00 Place: B-116

Bouldering is a subdiscipline of climbing that challenges both problem-solving skills and physical abilities. This study focuses on the decision-making processes of climbers when solving boulder problems in an artificial and standardized climbing wall called MoonBoard. This study aims to build a goal-based AI agent that learns from previous solutions to plan the sequence of actions for novel boulder problems it encounters. We evaluate the agent's cost estimates and climbing solutions by comparing it to the difficulty estimations and solutions provided by expert climbers.

Date: 26.01.2023 / 09:30 Place: A-212

This study aims to gain an understanding of the content and the epistemic causal connective acquisition process of children aged 6;5- 8 in Turkish. For this purpose, to test whether there are connectives that children use specific to domains of causality as adults do (Çokal, Zeyrek, & Sanders, 2020); child and adult participants are given both descriptive (biased for content relations) and argumentative (biased for epistemic relations) tasks. Data that is collected from these tasks are annotated and statistically analyzed.

Date: 26.01.2023 / 13:30 Place: A-212

This research proposes a new AI-based approach to improve the user experience on online marketplaces by validating product images and metadata in an automated fashion. As e-commerce has become popular, online marketplaces have seen a surge in merchants offering various products and maintaining data quality of product metadata and images can be challenging. Our approach offers several advantages over traditional methods, including handling complex and noisy data and adapting to various challenging product categories, such as fashion items. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through comparisons with traditional methods and in different settings.

Date: 23.01.2023 / 13:00 Place: A-212

Counterfactual statements are conditional statements with false or unrealized antecedents. This thesis aims to analyze counterfactuals in Turkish using linguistic and causality perspectives, which will shed new light on their nature. The research will examine the antecedent’s need to be false or unrealized, the use of a complex suffix in Turkish and its relation to counterfactual interpretation, the difference between -DIysA and -sAydI and the role of pragmatics in the interpretation of a counterfactual statement. Additionally, this thesis is the first to have a clear focus on Turkish counterfactuals and use directed acyclic graphs to graphically represent counterfactual scenarios.

Date: 26.01.2023 / 11:00 Place: A-212