Cihad Tekinbaş

Research Interests

My research focuses on making fundamental data-intensive algorithms practical at scale, with a particular interest in how classical techniques can be redesigned for modern, high-throughput systems. The official department directory lists my research focus as Machine Learning.

• i. Scalable algorithms for large-scale data Nearest-neighbor and similarity search; efficient indexing and pruning strategies when data outgrows a single machine.
• ii. Recommendation systems K-nearest-neighbor based collaborative filtering; scaling latent-neighborhood computations for real-world item catalogs.
• iii. Information retrieval & data mining Retrieval models, ranking, and mining structure from large text corpora — including transformer-based, high-context retrieval for scientific texts.
• iv. Machine learning applications in engineering ML-based risk management and decision support in engineering and government contexts (AVESİS research area: Computer Science, Engineering and Technology).

Publications & Manuscripts

@article{tekinbas2025risk,
  title   = {Risk Management Based on Machine Learning},
  author  = {Tekinba{\c{s}}, Cihad and Alpaslan, Ferda Nur and
             G{\"u}{\c{c}}l{\"u}, A. Nusret},
  journal = {ASME Open Journal of Engineering},
  volume  = {4},
  pages   = {041022},
  year    = {2025},
  doi     = {10.1115/1.4069023}
}

@inproceedings{sagdic2020scalable,
  title     = {A Scalable K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm for
               Recommendation System Problems},
  author    = {Sagdic, A. and Tekinba{\c{s}}, Cihad and
               Arslan, E. and Kucukyilmaz, Tolga},
  booktitle = {2020 43rd International Convention on Information,
               Communication and Electronic Technology (MIPRO)},
  year      = {2020},
  address   = {Opatija, Croatia},
  pages     = {186--191},
  month     = {September--October}
}

Citation metrics as reported by AVESİS (Middle East Technical University Academic Data Management System): 2 publications · 1 citation and h-index 1 (WoS) · 3 citations and h-index 1 (Scopus). The two peer-reviewed entries above correspond to this AVESİS count.

Academic Career

• 2021 – present Research Assistant (Araştırma Görevlisi)
  Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara
• 2021 – present M.Sc. student, Computer Engineering
  Middle East Technical University, Faculty of Engineering
• 2017 – 2020 B.Sc., Computer Engineering
  TED University, Faculty of Engineering, Ankara

Teaching

As a research assistant in the Department of Computer Engineering at METU since 2021, I support undergraduate instruction — laboratory sessions, assignment mentoring, and grading — alongside my graduate research.

Prospective students: if you are a METU CENG undergraduate interested in a senior design or summer research project on scalable data algorithms or recommendation systems, you are welcome to reach out by email.

Research Group at METU CENG

The ML & Intelligent Systems research workspace at METU CENG, led by Cihad Tekinbaş, is an active research environment within the Department of Computer Engineering. The group's primary objective is to advance state-of-the-art architectures in machine learning and natural language processing: we leverage high-context large language models (LLMs) to construct intelligent agents capable of managing complex, multi-step scientific workflows and cross-modal data synthesis.

Research team & collaborators. Group lead: Cihad Tekinbaş (METU CENG), together with graduate research assistants and academic contributors within METU CENG. Faculty and research collaborators on the published work include F. N. Alpaslan and A. N. Güçlü (ASME Open Journal of Engineering, 2025) and T. Kucukyilmaz, A. Sagdic, and E. Arslan (MIPRO 2020).

Open positions. The group regularly hosts M.Sc. students, senior-design undergraduates, and summer research students of METU CENG working on LLM agents, retrieval, and ML evaluation. Prospective members: cihad@metu.edu.tr.

Verifiable Academic Identity

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