I have moved as a full professor to the University of Tübingen in October 2019.

Education

• PhD: University of Grenoble, France, 2014
• MSc: RWTH Aachen, Germany, 2010
• BSc: Trakya University, Turkey, 2008

Experience

• Professor of Computer Science at University of Tübingen, 2019 – Now
• Senior Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, 2017 – Now
• Assistant Professor at University of Amsterdam and Scientific Manager of UvA-Bosch Delta Lab, 2017 – 2019
• Visiting Researcher at UC Berkeley, 2016-2017
• Post Doctoral Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, 2014-2017

Short Bio

Dr. Zeynep Akata is a professor at the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Between 2017 and 2019, she was an Assistant Professor with the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Scientific Manager of the Delta Lab and a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany. She holds a BSc degree from Trakya University (2008), MSc degree from RWTH Aachen (2010) and a PhD degree from University of Grenoble (2014). After completing her PhD at the INRIA Rhone Alpes with Prof. Dr. Cordelia Schmid, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics with Prof. Dr. Bernt Schiele and a visiting researcher with Prof Trevor Darrell at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include machine learning that combine vision and language for the task of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI).

Teaching

• Leren (Introduction to Machine Learning), 2017 (BSc AI, Y2, P2)
• Leren (Introduction to Machine Learning), 2018 (BSc AI, Y2, P2)
• Philosophy of AI (Guest Lecture), March 2018
• Computer Vision 2 (Guest Lecture), May 2018

External Activities

• Area Chair for Conferences:
  • WACV 2016,  IJCAI 2018, ECCV 2018, BMVC 2019, CVPR 2019, ICCV 2019, CVPR 2020, ICML 2020, ECCV 2020
• Reviewer for Conferences:
  • ICCV 2015, 2017; ECCV 2016; ACCV 2016; CVPR 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018; EMNLP 2018;
  • NIPS 2016, 2017, 2018; AISTATS 2017;  AAAI 2018; ICLR 2018, ICML 2018, 2019
• Associate Editor for Journals:
  • Pattern Recognition Journal (Appointment between 2018-2020)
• Reviewer for Journals:
  • TPAMI 2015, 2016, 2017; IJCV 2015, 2016,2017
• Tutorial on Embeddings and Metric Learning, GCPR 2016, Organization Committee
• Gender Diversity in STEM fields, Springboard training program, 2015, Organization Committee
• Lise Meitner Award Fellowship for Excellent Women in Computer Science 2016, Organization Committee
• Tutorial on Zero-Shot Learning, CVPR 2017, Organization Committee
• CD-Make 2018, Cross Domain Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction, Organization Committee
• WiCV@ECCV 2018, Women in Computer Vision Workshop, Organization Committee
• Back2Basic 2018, Annual Computer Science Event, Amsterdam, Invited Speaker
• DSSV 2018, Conference on Data Science, Statistics and Visualization, Invited speaker
• BMVC 2018, British Machine Vision Conference, Invited Speaker

Awards and Funding

• Lise-Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science from Max Planck Society in 2014
• Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) grant from DARPA in 2017
• Young Researcher Award from Werner-von-Siemens Ring Foundation in 2019
• ERC Starting Grant in 2019

Students

• 2017-Now Stephan Alaniz @ University of Tübingen and Max Planck Institute for Informatics
• 2018-Now Marco Federici @ University of Amsterdam (with Dr. Nate Kushman and Dr. Patrick Forre)
• 2016-Now Yongqin Xian @ Max Planck Institute for Informatics (with Prof. Bernt Schiele)
• 2017-2019 Victor Garcia @ University of Amsterdam (with Prof. Max Welling)
• 2017-2019 Sadaf Gulshad @ University of Amsterdam (with Prof. Arnold Smeulders)
• 2018-2019 Maartje ter Hoeve @ University of Amsterdam (with Prof. Maarten de Rijke)
• 2018-2019 Rodolfo Corona @ UC Berkeley

 Selected Publications

2019

• Modeling Conceptual Understanding in Image Reference Games
  Rodolfo Corona, Stephan Alaniz, Zeynep Akata
  Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2019 (Spotlight)
• Combining Generative and Discriminative Models for Hybrid Inference
  Victor Garcia Satorras, Zeynep Akata, Max Welling
  Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2019 (Spotlight)
• Manipulating Attributes of Natural Scenes via Hallucination
  Levent Karacan, Zeynep Akata, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem
  ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 2019 (full paper)
• Semantically Tied Paired Cycle Consistency for Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval
  Anjan Dutta, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2019
• f-VAEGAN-D2: A Feature Generating Framework for Any-Shot Learning
  Yongqin Xian, Saurabh Sharma, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2019
• Generalized Zero- and Few-Shot Learning via Aligned Variational Autoencoders
  Edgar Schoenfeld, Sayna Ebrahimi, Samarth Sinha, Trevor Darrell, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2019
• SPNet: Semantic Projection Network for Zero-Label and Few-Label Semantic Segmentation
  Yongqin Xian, Subharata Choudhury, Yang He, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2019

2018

• Zero-Shot Learning – A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
  Yongqin Xian, Christoph Lampert, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2018
• Grounding Visual Explanations
  Lisa Anne Hendricks, Ronghang Hu, Trevor Darrell, Zeynep Akata
  European Conference of Computer Vision, ECCV 2018
• Textual Explanations for Self-Driving Vehicles
  Jinkyu Kim, Anna Rohrbach, Trevor Darrell, John Canny, Zeynep Akata
  European Conference of Computer Vision, ECCV 2018
• Multimodal Explanations: Justifying Decisions and Pointing to the Evidence
  Dong Huk Park, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Zeynep Akata, Anna Rohrbach, Bernt Schiele, Trevor Darrell, Marcus Rohrbach
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018 (Spotlight Presentation)
• Feature Generating Networks for Zero-Shot Learning
  Yongqin Xian, Tobias Lorenz, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018

2017

• Gaze Embeddings for Zero-Shot Image Classification
  Nour Karessli, Zeynep Akata, Bernt Schiele, Andreas Bulling
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2017 (Spotlight Presentation)
• Zero-Shot Learning – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
  Yongqin Xian, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2017
• Exploiting saliency for object segmentation from image level labels
  Seong Joon Oh, Rodrigo Benenson, Anna Khoreva, Zeynep Akata, Mario Fritz, Bernt Schiele
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2017

2016

• Learning What and Where to Draw
  Scott Reed, Zeynep Akata, Santosh Mohan, Samuel Tenka, Bernt Schiele and Honglak Lee
  Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2016 (Oral Presentation)
• Generating Visual Explanations
  Lisa Hendricks, Zeynep Akata, Marcus Rohrbach, Jeff Donahue, Bernt Schiele and Trevor Darrell
  European Conference of Computer Vision, ECCV 2016
• Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis
  Scott Reed, Zeynep Akata, Xinchen Yan, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Honglak Lee and Bernt Schiele
  International Conference of Machine Learning, ICML 2016 (Oral Presentation)
• Learning Deep Representations of Fine-Grained Visual Descriptions
  Scott Reed, Zeynep Akata, Honglak Lee and Bernt Schiele
  IEEE Conference of Computer Vision and Patter Recognition, CVPR 2016 (Spotlight Presentation)
• Multi-Cue Zero-Shot Learning with Strong Supervision
  Zeynep Akata, Mateusz Malinowski, Mario Fritz and Bernt Schiele
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2016 (Spotlight Presentation)
• Latent Embeddings for Zero-Shot Classification
  Yongqin Xian, Zeynep Akata, Gaurav Sharma, Quynh Nguyen, Matthias Hein and Bernt Schiele
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2016 (Spotlight Presentation)
• Label Embeddings for Image Classification
  Zeynep Akata, Florent Perronnin, Zaid Harchaoui, Cordelia Schmid
  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), Vol:38, No:7, July 2016

2015 and Earlier

• Evaluation of Output Embeddings for Image Classification
  Zeynep Akata, Scott Reed, Daniel Walter, Honglak Lee and Bernt Schiele
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2015
• Label-Embedding for Attribute-Based Classification,
  Zeynep Akata, Florent Perronnin, Zaid Harchaoui and Cordelia Schmid,
  IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2013
• Good Practice in Large-Scale Learning for Image Classification,
  Zeynep Akata, Florent Perronnin, Zaid Harchaoui and Cordelia Schmid,
  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2014