Mehmet Kerem Turkcan
Associate Research Scientist in Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University
210E 2276 12th Avenue
Columbia University
New York, New York 10027
Greetings! I am currently an associate research scientist in the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3) and Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University specializing in computer vision and deep learning applications. Before, I was a postdoctoral research scientist in Electrical Engineering. My research focuses on real-world, low-latency deployment of object detection and trajectory prediction models, and retrieval-augmented generation via large language models. To test algorithms, I lead projects on large-scale data collection and annotation, and improve upon the state-of-the-art models to adapt them to the strict performance and quality requirements of real-world use cases. Right now, my focus is specifically on applications to urban streetscapes and robotic surgeries.
Previously, as a member of the Bionet group, I studied the efficient initialization and execution of very-large-scale, real connectome and synaptome driven, single-synapse-level simulations of neural circuits on GPUs for the purpose of understanding realistic neural networks. Using the tools I developed, I worked on the design of computational circuits for understanding the mushroom body and the lateral horn, two brain regions in insects linked with associative and evolutionary memories. I am also one of the main developers of an open-source interactive neuroscientific computing platform called FlyBrainLab (FBL) that enables access to, manipulation of and simulations for fruit fly brain data.
News
Jun 5, 2024 | Our paper, “Data-Driven Traffic Simulation for an Intersection in a Metropolis”, has been accepted into the POETS Workshop at CVPR 2024! |
---|---|
May 7, 2024 | Our paper, “Evaluating Zero-Shot Image Tagging for Urban Traffic Intersection Scenes”, has been accepted into the VAND Workshop at CVPR 2024! |
May 1, 2024 | I will be a Co-Chair of the CS3 Student Leadership Council of the Center for Smart Streetscapes for the 2024-2025 cycle! |
Apr 29, 2024 | I received the Electrical Engineering Distinguished Teaching Award for my teaching achievements in 2023! |
Oct 25, 2023 | I will be in Boston to present our work on transfer learning for low-resource surgical phase segmentation at the ACS Clinical Congress 2023. |
Selected Publications
- The Fruit Fly Brain Observatory: From Structure to FunctionBioRxiv, 2019
- Accelerating with FlyBrainLab the discovery of the functional logic of the Drosophila brain in the connectomic and synaptomic eraElife, 2021
- A Programmable Ontology Encompassing the Functional Logic of the Drosophila BrainFrontiers in Neuroinformatics, 2022
- Surgical Phase Recognition in Inguinal Hernia Repair—AI-Based Confirmatory Baseline and Exploration of Competitive ModelsBioengineering, 2023
- Optimizing Computer Vision in Surgery Workflows Through Transfer LearningIn American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress 2023, Oct 2023