Assoc. Prof. Cem Tekin has received the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK) Encouragement Award for 2024. Prof. Tekin received the award for his internationally recognized and outstanding scientific work on machine learning, data science, and cognitive communications. systems.
Assoc. Prof. Cem Tekin received his bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University in 2008, graduating as the top student in his department. He obtained master’s degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in Electrical Engineering: Systems and Mathematics in 2010 and 2011, respectively. He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering: Systems at the same university in 2013. Between 2013 and 2015, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since returning to Turkey in 2015, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bilkent University.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tekin’s research focuses on the balance between exploration and exploitation in sequential decision-making problems in engineering. Within this domain, he has worked on applications in cognitive communications, streaming big data mining, recommendation systems, and personalized medicine. The learning methods developed by Assoc. Prof. Tekin aim to maximize rewards by adapting to continuously changing conditions. In this context, he has developed novel models and learning algorithms for Markov decision processes, contextual and combinatorial bandit problems, sequential multi-objective optimization, sequential vector optimization, and Bayesian optimization. These algorithms have been applied to solve challenging engineering problems, ranging from personalized medical treatment recommendations to resource optimization in cognitive communications. He also developed the first open-source Python library for black-box vector optimization. He has served as the principal investigator on five TÜBİTAK-funded projects (two 1001, one 1003, one 3501, and one 2232). He has received several prestigious awards, including the 2019 BAGEP Award, the 2019 METU Parlar Foundation Research Incentive Award, the 2020 IEEE Turkey Research Incentive Award, the 2023 Bilkent University Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2023 TÜBA-GEBİP Award.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tekin has published 36 journal articles in leading journals such as IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing, and Machine Learning. He has also presented 38 conference papers at internationally renowned conferences, including AISTATS, ICLR, and NeurIPS, which are among the most important conferences in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Additionally, he has published five book chapters and one monograph. His research group, which currently includes 2 Ph.D. and 5 master’s students, continues to work on cutting-edge problems. To date, he has supervised the graduation of 11 students at the master’s and Ph.D. levels.