About Me

Hi! I’m Cem (pronounced Jem - Turkish phonetics!), I’m currently a Computer Science Ph.D. Student at Stanford University at the Stanford Vision & Learning Lab advised by Prof. Fei-Fei Li, and a Research Scientist Intern at NVIDIA Research advised by Dr. Jim Fan, Dr. Yuke Zhu & Dr. Anima Anandkumar.

My research focus is developing methods and platforms to support the development of robotic agents that can successfully support humans in our everyday activities.

My recent work includes BEHAVIOR, a benchmark and simulation environment for training and evaluating embodied learning models on long-horizon household activities. Our latest publication on this series of work, BEHAVIOR-1K, was nominated for a Best Paper Award at CoRL 2022.

Nowadays I’m working on applying state-of-the-art computer vision and robot learning methods (IL/RL) as well as LLMs to establishing meaningful baselines on difficult household robotics tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and interactive navigation.

Previously, I was an AI Resident at Google X / Everyday Robots, and Software Engineer at Google on the YouTube Premium team. At X, I worked on improving learning-from-demonstrations methods to make robots better at performing everyday tasks.

I completed my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Georgia Tech between 2016 and 2018, concentrating on Theoretical CS and AI. My work as an undergraduate researcher, advised by Prof. Dana Randall, was on stochastic algorithms for self-organizing particle systems, an abstraction of programmable matter. My undergraduate thesis, titled Markov Chain Algorithms for Emergent Phenomena in Self-Organizing Particle Systems, is available here on Georgia Tech’s thesis database.