Bilkent University Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department’s Assoc. Prof. Cem Tekin has received this year’s Outstanding Young Scientist Awards from the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA).
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Cem Tekin received his undergraduate degree from Middle East Technical University, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, in 2008 as valedictorian. He received his MS degrees in Electrical Engineering: Systems and Mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2010 and 2011. He received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering: Systems from the same university in 2013. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2013 to 2015. Since returning to Türkiye in 2015, he has been working as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bilkent University.
In his research, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tekin focuses on understanding how to tradeoff exploration and exploitation in engineering problems that involve sequential decision-making under uncertainty, including cognitive communications, big data stream mining, recommender systems, and personalized medicine. He designs learning agents for these problems that maximize their payoffs by continuously adapting to ever-evolving conditions. His leading contributions include designing and analyzing learning algorithms for bandit problems with Markov and context-dependent reward structures, combinatorial action sets, and multi-dimensional performance metrics. These algorithms have been applied in various settings, including adaptively optimizing treatments in personalized healthcare and transmission parameters in AI-enabled communication networks.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tekin has published papers in AISTATS, ICLR, and NeurIPS conferences, which are among the most important conferences in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. He has also published papers in leading journals like 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 published over seventy journal/conference papers, five book chapters, and one monograph related to his research areas. His work has received over two thousand citations. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tekin worked as a principal investigator in various TÜBİTAK 1001, 1003, and 3501 projects. He continues his studies with his research group, which includes two doctoral and five master’s students. So far, he graduated eleven master’s and doctorate students.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tekin is the recipient of the 2019 Science Academy Young Scientist (BAGEP) Award, METU Parlar Foundation 2019 Research Incentive Award, 2020 IEEE Turkey Chapter Research Incentive Award, and 2023 Bilkent University Distinguished Teaching Award.