Sinan KALKAN's Web Page

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Sinan KALKAN's Webpage

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Dept. of Computer Engineering
Middle East Technical University
Dumlupinar Bulvari, No: 1, 06531 Cankaya, Ankara (Turkey)

E-mail: skalkan [at] metu [dot] edu [dot] tr
Office: A-209

About

I am a professor at the Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University (METU) and a member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). Before METU, I was a researcher at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN) Gottingen (Germany). I did my PhD at University of Gottingen in collaboration with University of Southern Denmark under the supervision of Prof. Florentin Worgotter and Norbert Kruger. I was a visiting researcher of University of Cambridge AFAR Research Group between 2019-2020.

Awards, Fellowships

Member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).
METU Academic Performance Award, between 2018 and 2026.
Science Academy, Turkiye: Young Scientists Awards (2020).
TUBITAK International Postdoctoral Research Scholarship Programme (BIDEB 2219) recepient for visiting the University of Cambridge AFAR Research Group [Webpage] between 2019 and 2020.
METU Best Thesis Awards (2018 for Ilker Bozcan's MSc Thesis; and 2021 for Kemal Oksuz's PhD Thesis).
ECCV Outstanding Reviewer, 2020.
IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, Best Paper Award given to our paper H. Celikkanat, G. Orhan, N. Pugeault, F. Guerin, E. Sahin, S. Kalkan, "Learning Context on a Humanoid Robot using Incremental Latent Dirichlet Allocation", IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 8(1):42-59, 2016.
METU Lecturer of the Year Award (2014 and 2014).

Research Groups, Labs and Centers

Proud member of the following research centers, labs and groups:

European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) [Webpage].
University of Cambridge AFAR Research Group [Webpage].
METU Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Center (ROMER) [Webpage].
METU Image Analysis Center (OGAM) [Webpage].
METU Image Processing Laboratory [Webpage].
METU Balance Research Group [Webpage].
METU Energy Research Group [Webpage].

Research Interests

Trustworthy and Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
Computer Vision: Object Detection, Segmentation, Recognition.
Machine/Deep Learning: Imbalance Problems, Uncertainty Estimation, Bias and Fairness.
Robotics: Robot Learning, Manipulation, Foundation Models.

News: Recent Talks & Papers [Since 2026]

Delivered a talk as part of the METU Learn & Connect lecture series on Artificial Intelligence and the Wizard of Oz.
Paper accepted to ICML 2026: "FairSSL: Fair Multimodal Self-Supervised Learning".
Gave two keynote talks at the Science Academy Summer School on Artificial Intelligence. One introductory talk on Transformers and one on "Artificial Intelligence and the Wizard of Oz: Trustworthy Machine Learning". Slides are available here.
Received the METU Academic Performance Award for the research activities in 2025.
Paper accepted to CVPR 2026: "MatchED: Crisp Edge Detection Using End-to-End, Matching-based Supervision"
Delivered a talk as part of the Inzva Computer Vision Cohort in May 2026.
Two papers accepted to FG 2026: "Gaze4HRI: Benchmarking Learning-based Gaze Estimation for Human-Robot Interaction" and "Investigating Bias and Fairness in Appearance-based Gaze Estimation".
Paper accepted at Neurocomputing: "Intrinsic Dimensionality as a Model-Free Measure of Class Imbalance".
Delivered a keynote talk at 2nd Children's Picture Books Symposium on "Artificial Intelligence and Writing/Illustration".
Gave a talk at Computer Engineering Congress "AI and Ethics" on "Is AI ready for us?".
New paper at Int. Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: "Machine Learning Fairness for Depression Detection Using EEG Data".
Delivered a TedX talk at TedX Sille Youth on "Is AI ready for us?".
New paper at Machine Vision and Applications: "L-VAE: Variational Auto-Encoder with Learnable Beta for Disentangled Representation", Machine Vision and Applications".
For other papers, please see Research.

Selected Publications

J. Cheong, A. Mogharabin, P. P. Liang, H. Gunes, S. Kalkan, "FairSSL: Fair Multimodal Self-Supervised Learning", 43rd Int. Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026.
B. Cetinkaya, S. Kalkan*, E. Akbas*, "MatchED: Crisp Edge Detection Using End-to-End, Matching-based Supervision", The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026. (Preprint | Code | Project page)
F. Yavuz, B. C. Cam, A. H. Dogan, K. Oksuz, E. Akbas*, S. Kalkan*, "Bucketed Ranking-based Losses for Efficient Training of Object Detectors", 18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024. *Equal senior contribution. (Preprint | Code)
B. Cetinkaya, S. Kalkan*, E. Akbas*, "RankED: Addressing Imbalance and Uncertainty in Edge Detection Using Ranking-based Losses", IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024. (Preprint | Publisher's webpage | Code)
J. Cheong, S. Kalkan, H. Gunes, "FairReFuse: Referee-Guided Fusion for Multi-Modal Causal Fairness in Depression Detection", 32nd Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2024.
Z. S. Baltaci, K. Oksuz, S. Kuzucu, K. Tezoren, B. K. Konar, A. Ozkan, E. Akbas*, S. Kalkan*, "Class Uncertainty: A Measure to Mitigate Class Imbalance", under review, 2023. (Arxiv). *Equal senior contribution.
K. Oksuz, B. C. Cam, S. Kalkan*, E. Akbas*, "One Metric to Measure them All: Localisation Recall Precision (LRP) for Evaluating Visual Detection Tasks", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 44(12):9446-9463, 2022. (Arxiv | Publisher's webpage | Code). *Equal senior contribution.
K. Oksuz, B. C. Cam, S. Kalkan*, E. Akbas*, "Imbalance Problems in Object Detection: A Review", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 43(10):3388-3415, 2021. (Arxiv | Publisher's webpage | Repository). *Equal senior contribution.
K. Oksuz, B. C. Cam, E. Akbas*, S. Kalkan*, "A Ranking-based, Balanced Loss Function Unifying Classification and Localisation in Object Detection", Thirty-fourth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), spotlight paper, 2020. (Arxiv | Conference page | Code). * Equal senior contribution.
N. Krueger, P. Janssen, S. Kalkan, M. Lappe, A. Leonardis, J. Piater, A. J. Rodriguez-Sanchez, L. Wiskott, "Deep Hierarchies in the Primate Visual Cortex: What Can We Learn For Computer Vision?", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 35(8):1847-1871, August 2013. (Preprint | Publisher's Website)
S. Kalkan, F. Woergoetter, N. Krueger, "Statistical Analysis of Local 3D Structure in 2D Images", IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2006. (PDF)