ABOUT ME
Working in the areas of automatic reasoning, planning and machine learning for cognitive systems / robots, artificial intelligence in games, multiple robot team strategies in collaborative / competitive environments; Assoc. Dr. Sanem Sarıel is the founder and coordinator of ITU Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory.
In 2002, Sarıel was awarded by Siemens Turkey Excellence Award and in 2018, Sarıel was awarded by the “Best Product” award during the 13th Technology Awards given by TÜBİTAK, TTGV and TÜSİAD, for her joint work conducted with Triodor Software Company.
Academic Career:
Completing her bachelor’s degree in ITU Control and Computer Engineering, master’s and doctorate degrees in ITU Computer Engineering, Dr. Sarıel has been working at ITU Computer Engineering Department since 2007 and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Artificial Intelligence.
During her doctoral studies, Sarıel worked as a researcher under NSF Project at Georgia Institute of Technology in the USA between 2004-2006. Sarıel worked as a visiting researcher at the University of South Florida in 2008 and at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Among the academic duties of Dr. Sarıel, is the coordination of ITU Game and Interaction Technologies Graduate Program.
Dr. Sarıel served as a member of the Executive Board of the RoboCup organization, the most prestigious robot competitions organization. Besides, Dr. Sarıel is one of the founders and advisory board members of Turkey Robotics Conference (ToRK) organized throughout Turkey.
Projects:
In her PhD study, Dr. Sarıel enabled the development of a generic architecture for distributed task sharing for robot teams working in collaborative environments. This architecture has been used effectively in many different application fields.
Dr Sarıel, together with her students, carried out projects on robot team strategies, planning and learning for RoboCup 3D simulation league competitions and participated in leagues.
Her recent academic studies are concentrated on lifelong learning methods of cognitive robots. Dr. Sarıel completed the execution of two TÜBİTAK projects on these issues. In these projects, an open source robot vision and environment modeling system (Violet) that can be used in different robot systems has been developed and opened to general use.
Her recent TÜBİTAK project is about the development of machine learning methods, including deep reinforcement learning methods, which are necessary for humanoid robots to carry out daily tasks safely. In addition, Dr. Sarıel has been involved in many projects as director, researcher and consultant within the scope of the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology, TÜBİTAK Teydeb Program and ITU Scientific Research Projects Program. Dr. Sarıel cooperates with the industry within the scope of the TÜBİTAK Teydep project and provides consultancy on artificial intelligence methods. In the TÜBİTAK Teydeb project, carried out together with Triodor company and her students, Dr. Sarıel provid