Dr Oya Celiktutan is a Reader at the Centre for Robotics Research in the Department of Engineering and leads the Social AI & Robotics Laboratory. She received a BSc degree in Electronics Engineering from Uludag University, and an MSc and PhD degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University, Turkey. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting researcher at the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon, France. After completing her PhD, she moved to the United Kingdom and worked on several projects as a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary University London, the University of Cambridge, and Imperial College London, respectively. In 2018, she joined King’s College London.

Dr Celiktutan’s research focuses on multimodal machine learning to develop autonomous agents, such as robots and virtual agents, capable of seamlessly interacting with humans. This encompasses tackling challenges in multimodal perception, understanding and forecasting human behaviour, as well as advancing the navigation, manipulation, and social awareness skills of these agents. Her work has been supported by EPSRC, The Royal Society, and the EU Horizon, as well as through industrial collaborations. She received the EPSRC New Investigator Award in 2020. Her team’s research has been recognised with several awards, including the Best Paper Award at IEEE Ro-Man 2022, NVIDIA CCS Best Student Paper Award Runner Up at IEEE FG 2021, First Place Award and Honourable Mention Award at ICCV UDIVA Challenge 2021. Dr Oya Celiktutan was promoted to a Reader in AI and Robotics in August 2024.

Research Interests

• Multimodal Machine Learning
• Human-Robot Interaction
• Human Behaviour Analysis and Synthesis
• Generative Models
• Continual Learning
• Reinforcement Learning

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