A picture of me

I am a 2nd year Ph.D. Student in Robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I am a member of the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab and my advisor is Dr. Andrea Thomaz. I received my B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering with an extra minor in Mechatronics in 2007 and an M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering in 2010, both from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey.

My research interests include human-robot interaction and machine learning for robotics. I am currently working on robotic learning from demonstration for everyday people. The main vision is to enable everybody to program their robots with ease.

I was affiliated with the KOVAN Lab while I was an M.Sc. student and worked on the EU FP 7 project ROSSI.


You can reach me through barisakgun at gmail.