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Drink liberally from the well of knowledge; it has never yet been found dry.
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At Bilgi I am working with students on COMP 313 academic skills, COMP 332 software engineering, COMP 451 dissertation proposal, and COMP 452 dissertation. Additionally, I am about to open two new 3rd year courses on autonomous movement for robots as well as graphics & simulation.
My current research website is hosted at the University of Birmingham
My research is in artificial intelligence, cognitive robotics, and computer vision, specifically intelligent understanding of the physical world, with a view to re-use.
Below is my latest schedule. Appointments with me can be made via email.
This semester I am teaching two new 3rd year selected topics courses: optimal action for autonomous robots (305) in the fall, and graphics & simulation (304) in the spring. Note that the title of the selected topic for course 305 changed in August 2011 because of a clash in course content with a set of new engineering courses. Details of these courses are below:
The course is a problem solving and programming course with a focus on solving interesting optimization and estimation problems in mobile robotics. The idea is to get a basic familiarisation with the main problems in the field of autonomous robotics literature and the practicalities as well as some techniques for optimization and estimation in real situations.
In this course students address a small set of assignments and are given leeway in choosing and implementing the particular approaches they use on these problems. The assignments will be interesting problems in trajectory optimization and estimation for mobile robots. The assignments will be conducted using a robot simulation visualised in the open source 3D editor blender with a BulletPhysics back-end. Programming will generally be done in the very easy and fun language Python. Python is quickly becoming the language of choice in numerical scientific applications, as well as more generally; it is easy to learn compared to many other languages and as such knowledge of it is not a prerequisite to this course.
The techniques of optimization and estimation learnt in this course are applicable in a large number of areas and one of the focuses in the course is on the re-use of techniques over multiple problems. A lot of engineering problems, including planning, control, design, simulation, financial decision making, and more, can be boiled down to estimation and optimization problems for which a vary varied set of techniques exist. This course is an introduction to these problems in the context of mobile robotics and a small selection of solution techniques.
[most of this will have been done in highschool or introductory university math]
This course is about building a moving character in a gameworld while learning the skills of 3D graphics programming and real-time physical simulation and the associated mathematical background.
In this course students will design, render and animate a simple character that will inhabit a gameworld. The focus in this course is on 3D graphics using OpenGL, animation using physical simulation, and prototyping using Blender3D. The character will be built in stages.
The techniques learnt in this course are also applicable in scientific computing, robotics, HCI, and games programming.
Technical topics covered in this course include: rendering pipeline, transforms, geometry, trimesh approximations, [illumination texture & shadows], collision detection, linear physics, and numerical methods of simulation. Advanced topics will be covered only briefly as the aim is to cover the whole process of building a moving character from beginning to end. Programming is currently planned to be in C++; students can contact me to discuss in advance with particular requirements.
[most of this will have been done in highschool or introductory university math]
Istanbul Bilgi University Dolapdere Campus Room 136D
+90 212 311 5134 (though email is more likely to catch me)