2021 Graduate and Undergraduate Projects
FACULTY MEMBER |
DEPARTMENT |
NAME OF THE PROJECT |
PROJECT DETAILS |
| Asst. Prof. Gizem Erdem | Psychology | Close relationships with peers and romantic partners in adolescence & emerging adulthood | Close relationships with peers and romantic partners in adolescence & emerging adulthood: This project aims to explore relationship maintenance behaviors in friendships and relationship processes in romantic relationships and their associations with well-being, mental health, and relationship satisfaction. |
| Juvenile delinquency and youth mental health | Juvenile delinquency and youth mental health: This is a multi-method and a mixed design study with three consecutive research phases. Overall goal of the study is to understand how relationships fare after incarceration, relational needs of juveniles, and evidence-based programs to improve their mental health and well-being. | ||
| Substance abuse, stigma, and sibling relationships | Substance abuse, stigma, and sibling relationships: This project involves 5 phases, examining alcohol and substance abuse from a family systems perspective. The study utilizes experimental and survey methods. | ||
| Assoc. Prof. Tilbe Göksun | Psychology | Language and Thought Interactions | In Language and Cognition Lab (https://lclab.ku.edu.tr/), we examine the relation between language (multimodal – gesture and speech) and many cognitive domains. We work with different populations and age groups. We also examine young children’s early language and cognitive development using techniques such as eyetracking, parent-child interaction, standardized tasks, and experiments for specific cognitive domains. For these lines of research, the project assistants will help running participants, coding and analyzing data as well as designing new studies. |
| Assoc. Prof. Aykut Erdem | Computer Engineering | Deep Learning Based Analysis of 360° Images/Videos | Student will learn about the specific challenges to process 360° image/video content for virtual reality and work on deep neural network architectures specifically designed for the medium. |
| Learned Image Priors for Semantic Image Editing | Student will learn how Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be utilized for performing semantic edits to manipulate a given image. | ||
| Prof. Özgür Müstecaplıoğlu | Physics | Quantum Simulations for Quantum Biology and Energy Systems | Students will review very basics of quantum physics and its role in biological and energy systems. Students will learn some basic numerical simulation methods, using matlab, python, c, fortran or mathematica, applicable to quantum biology and energy systems. Students will develop basic skills of research discussions, report writing, and presentations by writing study reports, attending research group meetings, and presenting their studies. |
| Assoc. Prof. Özlem Altan | International Relations | International Development Projects in the Field: Assessing Realized Priorities and Strategies | This project intends to code UNDP projects initiated and implemented in the last 10 years throughout the world. It seeks to understand how development priorities agreed by the UN are operationalized, and how these projects have devised goals, what strategies have been used, who has been targeted and with what resources. At the end of the coding, the research objective is to be able to formulate a holistic picture of trends in the field in terms of resource allocation, priorities shaping development and what these means especially for issue related to women’s rights and gender equality. The research will entail the coding of the following information based on each project’s website in the UNDP a. Priority SDGs b. Project strategies and tools c. Target and partner groups d. Number of outcomes to be achieved And the downloading of two project documents for each project. |
| Assoc. Prof. Metin Sezgin | Computer Engineering | Smart Interfaces Lab | Artificial intelligence has assumed a transformative role in the field of education as in all other fields. It has been a tool that we can use to democratize educational content and to ensure equal access to education for all. At Smart Interfaces Lab, we combine this opportunity with our communication with many stakeholders, designing artificial intelligence interfaces for programming, science and design courses. In the university program, two types of projects will be developed: 1. Development of smart interface applications that will transform programming, science and design courses 2. To develop program design libraries that ICT teachers can use freely to develop these applications. (For example, creating a new program block for the Card-ON project and an interface where they can easily generate the output of this program. Https://karton.ku.edu.tr/) |
| Visualization Game | In this project, we will create a video game mostly based on text. A Case of Distruct by Ben Wander can be a similar example. The aim of the game will be making players visualize a detailed description of their surroundings by giving them only a brief sketch along with a lot of story-telling elements. This will result in a tool for increasing the detail visualization for imagined scenes, and this tool will be specifically tailored for a future experimental design. | ||
| Asst. Prof. Mehmet C. Onbaşlı | Electrical&Electronics Engineering | Spintronic chip design and verification | In this project, the student is going to learn how logic and memory chips can be designed using spin-based devices. After the study of the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation, students are going to use the open-source OOMMF (Object-oriented Micromagnetics Framework) simulation package to model spintronic logic gates such as AND, OR, NOT gates. Finally, the student is going to implement a sorting algorithm (i.e. quicksort) and implement the spintronic circuit that sorts an arbitrary sequence of values efficiently. |
| Prof. Kerem Pekkan | Mechanical Engineering | Development of medical image analysis and 3D reconstruction Tools | The students will help development of medical image analysis and 3D reconstruction tools applied to Cardiovascular diseases. In house code development tasks involving matlab and Pyhton. |
| Computational Modeling in Biomedical Engineering | The students will help on going solid and fluid (blood flow) modeling projects related to cardiovascular diseases and devices. | ||
| Blood cell mechanics and cardiovascular device design | The students will help our research projects focusing blood cells and their flow through various cardiovascular devices such as ventricle assist devices and blood oxygenators. | ||
| Prof. Hakan Ürey | Electrical&Electronics Engineering | Virtual reality and augmented reality programming and application development using artificial intelligence | Student will work in the Optical Microsystems Laboratory (mems.ku.edu.tr ) in Prof. Hakan Urey’s group in various research projects. |
| Assoc. Prof. Çiğdem G. Demir | CE / Computer Engineering | Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis | With the recent advances in deep learning, medical image analysis is becoming a popular research field all over the world. Studies in this field aim to design and implement smart computational tools that work on quantitative metrics.
In our research group we have been working on the design and implementation of novel algorithms that segment and classify medical images of different kinds. These algorithms use the principles of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In the Summer Research Program, undergraduate students who show interest in these topics, will find opportunities to recognize this exciting field as well as to work on the design and coding of deep learning algorithms for medical image analysis. |
| Asst. Prof. Asım Evren Yantaç | Media and Visual Arts | Building Indoor Experiences in VR | In this project, we are building 3D indoor environments to support user experience research. The scope of the study covers ideation, speculative design, brainstorming, creating reference boards and mood boards, 3D modeling, preparation for a VR experience and programming. Students joining study will be a member of the team and will take different tasks within the project. Team meetings will be held 3 times a week through Zoom and the studies will be conducted remotely. Physical meetings would be held in the lab a few times if it is necessary. |
| Field Study of Collaboration in VR | This project is an ongoing analysis of how various professionals work together in collaborative VR platforms. It includes the organization and management of focus groups, workshops, professional networks, and co-design sessions. Students are expected to participate in these activities and support the project by helping with management, communication and documentation during the events. Students will need to become acceptably proficient in downloading, installing and using various multi-user VR platforms, including Altspace, VRChat, Rec Room, Glue, Arthur and others to be identified. Access to these VR platforms will be provided by the researcher to the students. |
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| Prof. Aylin Küntay | Psychology | Infants’ social, cognitive, and language development | We have several projects where we investigate infants’ and young children’s cognitive and social development. Interns are expected to conduct studies with children in online platforms such as Zoom, contact families and/or preschools, do literature search, prepare stimuli, and code data. |
| Improving spatial cognition in preschool-aged children | |||
| Prof. Barış Tan | Operations Management and Industrial Engineering | Design and Control of Production Systems and Supply Chains by Using Supervised Learning Methods | This project aims at developing a general method to design and control production systems and supply chains. First, the output flow characteristics of a given building block will be determined as a function of input flow characteristics by using a supervised learning algorithm. Discrete-event simulation will be used to generate the training data for the learning algorithm. Each analyzed building block will be combined in different configurations to evaluate the performance of different production system and supply chain structures in order to design production systems and supply chains effectively. Release control and inventory control problems in production systems and supply chains will also be analyzed by using machine learning and simulation. |
| Assoc. Prof. Alptekin Küpçü | Computer Engineering | Blockchain | You will join our current research project as part of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy Research Group, and work with our Master’s and Ph.D. students in cutting-edge research. You will also join the weekly group meetings, present your solutions, and feel as part of a team. |
| Cryptography Implementation | |||
| Secure Cloud | |||
| Game Theory and Cryptography | |||
| Asst. Prof. Zafer Doğan | Electrical&Electronics Engineering | Developing tractable deep learning models for image enhancement and restoration problems | Here we focus on image enhancement and restoration problem. Deep learning has become the method of choice for image enhancement and restoration. However, prior to the DL revolution, non-local image restoration methods, such as non-local means, and BM3D, were the dominant algorithms in the field. Here, the goal is to reconcile DL with non-local algorithms and come up with a new generation of powerful image enhancement and restoration methods. The topics include, but are not limited to: * Image/video super-resolution * Image/video denoising * Image/video inpainting * Image/video dehazing * Image/video deblurring |
| Asst. Prof. Merih Angın | International Relations | IMF Decides, Machine Learns: An AI Approach to IOs | The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is considered as “the most powerful international institution in history”, is frequently argued to be an agent of its most powerful shareholders. Challenging the common belief that the strategic allies of the United States and/or G5 countries always get better deals from the IMF, whereas it is the IMF staff who has the main leverage over the design of conditionality when low-income countries are borrowing from the Fund, this project will develop a novel framework, drawing upon a rich body of literature on the IMF, in order to present a comprehensive model that takes into account all actors having an impact on IMF program design. The following questions will be at the core of this research: What factors influence the terms (loan size, number of conditions, and conditionality waivers granted) of an IMF program? And how do those factors play into shaping the design of the programs? The project aims to make a major contribution to the literature by creating a comprehensive machine learning (ML) model for predicting the loan size, number of IMF conditions and waivers during program implementation, which complements traditional statistical models by integrating a larger number of variables and providing high accuracy of prediction. The research will also create a natural language processing (NLP) tool for automated, fast analysis of the IMF’s Executive Board meeting minutes, which is able to capture elements including individual board member sentiments, alliance between representatives of different countries and G5 stance with high accuracy. |
| Asst. Prof. Özge Subaşı | Media and Visual Arts | Designing for access, co-creation and wellbeing | We have several projects where we investigate the social aspects that affect how we perceive underprivileged positions in design (how we design for different age groups? abilities? geographies?) Interns are expected to conduct studies, collect self-ethnographic notes, and build assistive technology design or games, do literature research, and code data (you will be trained to do your part). Example Project 1: You will work on social aspects of accessibility in your environments (digital or physical), including collecting data, and preparing online surveys, charts, filming the relevant environments Example Project 2: You will work on how “age” is defined for students (what is it to be an old student?). This can be a collective arts project. Example Project 3: You will work on sharing cultures in Türkiye , what products are there for community life? How do we share? |
| Prof. Alper Kiraz | Physics | Deep learning in optical microscopy | We will use deep learning techniques using Python language for segmentation of images acquired by optical microscopy |
| Assoc. Prof. Reşat Bayer | International Relations | Cross-National Time-Series State of Emergency Dataset (1945-1990) | Students will participate in the data collection stage of State of Emergency (SOE) events between 1945-1990. It is part of broader research examining the domestic and international determinants of the SOE declarations, executions, terminations, and consequences. The project mainly involves hand-coding of a collection of newspaper data. The newspaper contents are related to the SOE declarations, e.g., the country of SOE, date of SOE, type of crisis triggering SOE, the national/regional scope of SOE, and the termination date of SOE. The coding procedures and training will equip the researchers for theory-driven and methodologically robust quantifiable interdisciplinary dataset creation. |
| Peace in the Interstate System | Students will participate in an ongoing project on diplomacy and determining the level of peace between several pairs of countries. Students will learn about conceptualization and measurement in social sciences. They will find, code, and analyze data. There will also be some guided readings. | ||
| Assoc. Prof. Erdem Yörük | Sociology | Collecting event information from news using machine learning and natural language processing | Our project aims at developing natural language processing, text mining, machine learning/deep learning, big data, and data science based software tools to collect event information from news articles. We analyze news articles that are collected from emerging countries such as India, China, South Africa, Brazil, and Mexico in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. The tasks that we tackle are related to data collection and management, information extraction, and text classification. We expect trainees to be keen on learning and applying relevant concepts and methods to our project. Our project is a European Research Council Project (ERC) and yields global scale and high quality research output. Please find more information on our website (https://emw.ku.edu.tr/). The open positions are in the scope of the second work package (WP2). |
| Using social media data and artificial intelligence techniques to understand the society | Our project aims at developing natural language processing, text mining, machine learning/deep learning, big data, and data science based software tools to collect event information from social media. The tasks that we tackle are related to data collection and management, information extraction, and text classification. We expect trainees to be keen on learning and applying relevant concepts and methods to our project. Our project is a European Research Council Project (ERC) and yields global scale and high-quality research output. Please find more information on our website (https://socialcomquant.ku.edu.tr/). The open positions are in the scope of the computational social science research aspect. | ||
| Prof. Ayşegül Özsomer | Business Administration | CAN ADVERTISING ENHANCE CONSUMER’S DESIRABLE COVID-19 HEALTH BEHAVIORS? | In March of 2020 the world was rocked as a global pandemic was declared due to the SARS-COVID-19 virus. This project explores the relationship of brand advertising messages and the pandemic as a potential influence on socially responsible health behaviors (social distancing, mask wearing, and hand washing). Can advertising play a role in encouraging desirable COVID-19 health behaviors and promote consumer welfare? |
| Assoc. Prof. Tuğba B. Önder | Medicine | Epigenetic mechanisms regulating cancer cells’ response to drugs | Online laboratory meetings, journal clubs and courses will be applied to support the ongoing projects in the laboratory. |
| Asst. Prof. Mehmet F. Ulu | Business Administration | Disasters and Financial Decisions | In this project, we plan to understand the impact of disasters, especially climatic shocks on financial decision-making. In this project, we will plan to use data from the Central Bank, State Meteorological Services, and Disasters and Emergency Management Service. We will expect the student to help us collect, clean, and shape the data and also execute some analysis using STATA. |
| Trade Shocks and Domestic Prices | In this project, we want to understand the line link between international trade shocks and domestic prices. We plan to use data from international agencies along with some scanner price data. We will expect the student to help us collect, clean, and shape the data and also execute some analysis using STATA. | ||
| Prof. Ahmet İçduygu | Mirekoç (Migration Research Center) | Forced Migration Resource Center | Forced Migration Resource Center (FMRC) is an online platform that brings together a diverse collection of reliable and accurate resources concerning the situation of Syrian refugees in Türkiye and the region. The center provides online and free access to anyone – that is, individual researchers, universities, civil society organizations, international organizations, policy makers and displaced persons themselves seeking information into issues related to forced migration and asylum. Primary aim of FMRC is to increase the research capacity of all actors working in the field and enhance inter-institutional communication among civil society, academia and international organizations addressing the issue of forced migration. It also aims to prevent the information pollution and regulate the overload of information in the field. |
| The European University of Post-Industrial Cities (UNIC) | The European University of Post-Industrial Cities (UNIC) is a unique alliance of eight universities in post-industrial cities that all face similar challenges and opportunities in terms of mobility, inclusion, and diversity. The UNIC alliance reflects a strong European post-industrial identity by shaping a new generation of Europeans able to cooperate and work within different European and global cultures, in different languages, and across borders, sectors and academic disciplines. Our ambition is to develop innovative and sustainable means of university collaboration that will boost student and staff mobility while fostering social inclusion and furthering societal impact. UNIC aims to grow towards optimum institutional convergence of its member universities in order to effectively deploy our shared experience of teaching and researching in post-industrial cities. | ||
| SOPEMI Project – The Continuous Reporting System on Migration (known under its French acronym, SOPEMI, from Système d’observation permanente des migrations) | This project will prepare a report for the Annual Meeting of the OECD Expert Group on Migration, and reviews the spectrum of international migration and asylum issues facing Türkiye in 2019-20. This study aims to provide basic statistical data on the international migration and asylum flows and on the stocks of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in the country and interprets them briefly. It also intends to serve as a guide for various public and private institutions and organisations, policy makers, scholars and researchers in their research on international migration and asylum issues. | ||
| Prof. Çağatay Başdoğan | Mechanical Engineering | Simulation of pick and place task using a robotic manipulator | Students will work with ROS (robot operating system) library and Gazebo graphics simulator to perform pick and place simulations with a virtual robotic manipulator. |
| Prof. Nazlı Baydar | Psychology | Strengthening the Processes Leading to the Resolution of Marital Conflict | The purpose of the proposed project is twofold: (1) to examine how marital conflict develops, the predictors of positive resolution of conflicts and unresolved escalating conflicts, and (2) to develop effective and culturally appropriate interventions that will support the positive resolution of marital conflict, and to prepare those interventions to be implemented to scale. The divorce rate in Türkiye is lower than in Europe and the United States. The prevailing collectivistic values may have given rise to the high value attributed to family unity, the patriarchal norms that regard being a wife and mother as the most important roles of women, the low level of education of women, and their lack of attachment to the labor force. These factors may lead to the avoidance of divorce even when the level of marital conflict is high. In this context, the negative consequences of escalating and unresolved conflict can be substantial, and the prevention of such conflicts and the development of positive conflict resolution skills may be even more important. The causes of marital conflict, the types of conflict, and non-constructive approaches to conflict were frequently studied in Western countries. However, the functioning of a family and the nature of the interactions of the individuals in the family depend on the cultural context. Therefore, studies conducted in other cultural contexts are not sufficient to understand the processes of family conflict and conflict resolution in Türkiye. There are a number of recent studies of marital conflict in Türkiye, but a comprehensive study that will address the limitations of prior studies is needed. For example, many of the previous studies were of small scale, were conducted with non-representative samples, and used conceptual frameworks and measurement instruments that were developed for families in dissimilar cultural contexts. The proposed research aims to study marital conflict without abstracting it from its cultural and social context; by considering its individual, dyadic, family, and extended family predictors with a holistic approach. The conceptual framework to be used adopts the general perspective of the Family Systems theory, but synthesizes this approach by taking into account individual level cognitive, behavioral and emotional processes and the macro level social / cultural processes. This research includes a quantitative study, a qualitative study, and an applied study that includes two intervention programs. The quantitative study will be conducted with a nationally representative sample, and will lead to a longitudinal database addressing issues related to marital conflict. Analyses using this database will delineate the development of marital conflict, the predictors of this process, and its consequences. The qualitative study will be conducted with 54 families from 6 provinces of Türkiye. These families will be selected among those with different intensities of conflict using data from the quantitative study. The goals of the qualitative study are to investigate the development of marital conflict from the subjective perspective of the families, to understand the approaches to conflict resolution, to delineate the language that is used to describe marital conflict, and to learn the subjective experiences of the spouses during marital conflict. The outcome of these two studies will be two intervention programs. A preventive intervention program will be developed to be implemented with small groups for supporting positive conflict resolution in couples who experience low levels of conflict. A remedial intervention program will be developed to be implemented with couples who experience high, unresolved and escalating levels of conflict. Both intervention programs will be fully structured, will use experimental designs, their outcomes will be evaluated quantitatively, and their processes will be evaluated qualitatively. Thus, both intervention programs will be ready to be disseminated.In conclusion, the proposed project will contribute to the theoretical basis of the study of marital conflict, will make a significant contribution to empirical basic research in this field with its nationally representative and longitudinal approach, and will use its accumulation of knowledge for developing effective and culturally appropriate intervention programs, serving the community. |
| Asst. Prof. Fatma Güney | Computer Engineering | Tracing the Ruin: Modelling the Collapse Process of Ancient Structures at Sagalassos | Seed project |
| Asst. Prof. Aykut Coşkun | Media and Visual Arts | Designing Future of Everyday Computational Objects through Time-based Interactions | This project aims to explore new relationships between personal data (e.g., water intake data) and everyday smart objects (e.g., water bottle) in combination with design and prototyping methods. The project focuses on designing novel time-based (temporal) interactions with personal data and applying these interactions to everyday smart objects. As the smart technologies advances in a rapid speed, little is known how our daily life objects would gain intelligence and more importantly, how and in what forms these objects will communicate with the end-users. In this growing research area, this project aims to create a set of artifacts that can communicate with the end-users through temporal interactions. |
| Designing a new therapy approach towards developmental delay by exploring a child’s daily life routines and integrating families at the early intervention stage. | The central aspect of the project is to create intelligent/innovative solutions for infants suffering from the developmental delay at an early stage, combined with design and psychology perspectives. The project aims to provide physical therapists and therapists with data opportunities to apply a better therapy approach and treatment process to families of developmentally delayed children, thereby helping developmentally delayed children between the ages of 0-3 avoid persistent problems that may occur in the future. It is important to gather data from different stakeholders such as families, therapists, and physiotherapists as they develop around the child. | ||
| Prof. Murat Tekalp | Electrical&Electronics Engineering | Image/Video Restoration and Compression by Deep Learning | Most recent algorithms for image/video restoration and compression will be implemented and possible improvements in performance will be investigated. |
| Asst. Prof. Özge Balcı | Chemistry | Literature research and thermodynamic modelling on the reactions of ternary boride based systems | Boron based advanced materials, especially the metal borides, have great importance both scientifically and industrially. In this project, the reaction mechanisms of ternary boride based systems will be investigated by literature research. After the acquired knowledge, the reactions of specific compounds selected for different applications will be modelled thermodynamically by the help of software programs. |
| Prof. Deniz Yüret | Computer Engineering | Turkish Data Depository (TDD) | This project aims to create an interactive website for Turkish natural language processing resources. Some of the subprojects are listed in http://bit.ly/3tZIDCC. For similar projects check out the following examples: * https://www.ldc.upenn.edu * http://www.elra.info/en * http://tools.nlp.itu.edu.tr |