Zeynep Akata is a professor of Computer Science within the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen. After completing her PhD at the INRIA Rhone Alpes with Prof Cordelia Schmid (2014), she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics with Prof Bernt Schiele (2014-17) and at University of California Berkeley with Prof Trevor Darrell (2016-17). Before moving to Tübingen in October 2019, she was an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam with Prof Max Welling (2017-19). She received a Lise-Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science from Max Planck Society in 2014, a young scientist honour from the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring foundation in 2019 and an ERC-2019 Starting Grant from the European Commission. Her research interests include multimodal learning and explainable AI.

Experience

• Professor of Computer Science, University of Tübingen, 2019 – Now
• Senior Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, 2017 – Now
• Assistant Professor at University of Amsterdam, 2017 – 2019
• Visiting Researcher at UC Berkeley, 2016-2017
• Post Doctoral Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, 2014-2017

Education

• PhD: University of Grenoble, France, 2014
• MSc: RWTH Aachen, Germany, 2010
• BSc: Trakya University, Turkey, 2008

Selected Publications

2020

• Attribute Prototype Network for Zero-Shot Learning
  Wenjia Xu, Yongqin Xian, Jiuniu Wang, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
  Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020
• Semantically Tied Paired Cycle Consistency for Any-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval
  Anjan Dutta, Zeynep Akata
  International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), accepted in June 2020
• Towards Recognizing Unseen Categories in Unseen Domains
  Massimiliano Mancini, Zeynep Akata, Elisa Ricci, Barbara Caputo
  European Conference of Computer Vision (ECCV) 2020
• Learning Robust Representations via Multi-View Information Bottleneck
  Marco Federici, Anjan Dutta, Patrick Forre, Nate Kushmann, Zeynep Akata
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020
• Evaluating Weakly Supervised Object Localization Methods Right
  Junsuk Choe, Seong Joon Oh, Seungho Lee,  Sanghyuk Chun, Zeynep Akata, Hyunjung Shim
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2020
• Manipulating Attributes of Natural Scenes via Hallucination
  Levent Karacan, Zeynep Akata, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem
  ACM SIGGRAPH 2020 (invited paper)

2019

• Modeling Conceptual Understanding in Image Reference Games
  Rodolfo Corona, Stephan Alaniz, Zeynep Akata
  Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2019 (Spotlight)
• Combining Generative and Discriminative Models for Hybrid Inference
  Victor Garcia Satorras, Zeynep Akata, Max Welling
  Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2019 (Spotlight)
• Manipulating Attributes of Natural Scenes via Hallucination
  Levent Karacan, Zeynep Akata, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem
  ACM Transactions on Graphics, TOG 2019 (full paper)
• Semantically Tied Paired Cycle Consistency for Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval
  Anjan Dutta, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2019
• f-VAEGAN-D2: A Feature Generating Framework for Any-Shot Learning
  Yongqin Xian, Saurabh Sharma, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2019
• Generalized Zero- and Few-Shot Learning via Aligned Variational Autoencoders
  Edgar Schoenfeld, Sayna Ebrahimi, Samarth Sinha, Trevor Darrell, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2019
• SPNet: Semantic Projection Network for Zero-Label and Few-Label Semantic Segmentation
  Yongqin Xian, Subharata Choudhury, Yang He, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2019
• Zero-Shot Learning – A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
  Yongqin Xian, Christoph Lampert, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2019

2018

• Grounding Visual Explanations
  Lisa Anne Hendricks, Ronghang Hu, Trevor Darrell, Zeynep Akata
  European Conference of Computer Vision, ECCV 2018
• Textual Explanations for Self-Driving Vehicles
  Jinkyu Kim, Anna Rohrbach, Trevor Darrell, John Canny, Zeynep Akata
  European Conference of Computer Vision, ECCV 2018
• Multimodal Explanations: Justifying Decisions and Pointing to the Evidence
  Dong Huk Park, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Zeynep Akata, Anna Rohrbach, Bernt Schiele, Trevor Darrell, Marcus Rohrbach
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018 (Spotlight Presentation)
• Feature Generating Networks for Zero-Shot Learning
  Yongqin Xian, Tobias Lorenz, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
  IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018