{
  "name": "Mert Kilickaya",
  "identity": "Senior AI Research Engineer",
  "researchGoal": "I am an AI researcher. My goal is to help automate vision. Can we build models that curate their own data, extract their own supervision, and adapt on the fly to changes in the real world?",
  "researchOverview": "I want visual models to take a more active role in their own learning: choosing useful data, learning from new observations, and adapting efficiently as conditions change. This goal connects my work in self-supervised, continual, and vision-language learning with applications from medical diagnostics to industrial visual intelligence.",
  "researchTopics": [
    "Data curation",
    "Self-supervised visual representation learning",
    "Continual learning",
    "Efficient adaptation",
    "Multimodal and vision-language learning",
    "Applied computer vision"
  ],
  "url": "https://kilickaya.github.io/",
  "imageURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/images/mert-selfie.jpeg",
  "profiles": [
    {
      "label": "Email",
      "url": "mailto:kilickayamert@gmail.com"
    },
    {
      "label": "CV",
      "url": "https://kilickaya.github.io/resume/resume.pdf"
    },
    {
      "label": "Google Scholar",
      "url": "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=MBMjO0sAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao"
    },
    {
      "label": "LinkedIn",
      "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/mert-kilickaya/"
    }
  ],
  "currentRole": {
    "organization": "Greyparrot",
    "roleTitle": "Senior Research Engineer",
    "researchFocus": "Industrial visual intelligence",
    "location": null,
    "dateLabel": "October 2026 — present",
    "startDate": "2026-10",
    "endDate": null,
    "current": true,
    "links": [],
    "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#experience"
  },
  "education": {
    "credential": "PhD in computer vision",
    "institution": "University of Amsterdam",
    "lab": "Qualcomm Labs",
    "labURL": "https://ivi.fnwi.uva.nl/quva/",
    "supervisor": {
      "name": "Arnold Smeulders",
      "url": "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=aa5Ou7gAAAAJ&hl=en"
    },
    "description": "I completed my PhD in computer vision at the University of Amsterdam’s Qualcomm Labs, supervised by Arnold Smeulders. Since then, I’ve been working in industry as a research engineer."
  },
  "career": [
    {
      "organization": "Greyparrot",
      "roleTitle": "Senior Research Engineer",
      "researchFocus": "Industrial visual intelligence",
      "location": null,
      "dateLabel": "October 2026 — present",
      "startDate": "2026-10",
      "endDate": null,
      "current": true,
      "links": [],
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#experience"
    },
    {
      "organization": "Agendia",
      "roleTitle": "ML Researcher",
      "researchFocus": "Biomarker Discovery",
      "location": "Amsterdam, Netherlands",
      "dateLabel": "2023 — October 2026",
      "startDate": "2023",
      "endDate": "2026-10",
      "current": false,
      "links": [],
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#experience"
    },
    {
      "organization": "Eindhoven University of Technology",
      "roleTitle": "ML Researcher",
      "researchFocus": "Continual Pretraining Agents",
      "location": "Netherlands",
      "dateLabel": "2022 — 2023",
      "startDate": "2022",
      "endDate": "2023",
      "current": false,
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "Learning to Learn Lab",
          "url": "https://dai.win.tue.nl/team/5/"
        }
      ],
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#experience"
    },
    {
      "organization": "Huawei Visual Search Lab",
      "roleTitle": "Research Intern",
      "researchFocus": "Multimodal Learning",
      "location": "Helsinki, Finland",
      "dateLabel": "March 2021 — January 2022",
      "startDate": "2021-03",
      "endDate": "2022-01",
      "current": false,
      "links": [],
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#experience"
    },
    {
      "organization": "Qualcomm Labs, University of Amsterdam",
      "roleTitle": "PhD Researcher",
      "researchFocus": "Deep Learning for Vision",
      "location": "Netherlands",
      "dateLabel": "2017 — 2022",
      "startDate": "2017",
      "endDate": "2022",
      "current": false,
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "Qualcomm Labs",
          "url": "https://ivi.fnwi.uva.nl/quva/"
        },
        {
          "label": "Arnold Smeulders",
          "url": "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=aa5Ou7gAAAAJ&hl=en"
        }
      ],
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#experience"
    }
  ],
  "news": [
    {
      "date": "2026-10",
      "text": "Our work at Agendia on AI-driven digital pathology for the 70-gene recurrence signature was presented at ESMO 2026, the most prestigious conference in Oncology.",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "AI-driven digital pathology for the 70-gene recurrence signature",
          "url": "https://agendia.com/agendia-ai-driven-digital-pathology-esmo-2026/"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "date": "2026-10",
      "text": "I joined Greyparrot as a Senior Research Engineer.",
      "links": []
    }
  ],
  "earlierNews": [
    {
      "date": "2024-10",
      "text": "Honored to be an outstanding reviewer for ECCV'24!",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "Honored to be an outstanding reviewer for ECCV'24!",
          "url": "https://kilickaya.github.io/resume/eccv_reviewer.pdf"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "date": "2024-07",
      "text": "Our work on Transformer Architecture Search is accepted at ECCV'24!",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "Our work on Transformer Architecture Search is accepted at ECCV'24!",
          "url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.16269"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "date": "2023-09",
      "text": "Our work on Locality-aware Vision-Transformer is accepted at BMVC'23!",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "Our work on Locality-aware Vision-Transformer is accepted at BMVC'23!",
          "url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.01561.pdf"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "publications": [
    {
      "id": "publication-esmo-2026",
      "title": "AI Driven Digital Pathology for the 70 Gene Recurrence Signature: Development and Validation in Early Stage Breast Cancer",
      "authors": [],
      "authorNote": "Agendia · Presented by Laura van ’t Veer",
      "venue": "ESMO 2026 · LBA20 (Oral)",
      "year": 2026,
      "description": "Our work at Agendia explores predicting recurrence risk directly from routine whole-slide images of breast cancer tissue, using supervision from the 70-gene signature.",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "Abstract",
          "url": "https://agendia.com/ai-driven-digital-pathology-for-the-70-gene-recurrence-signature-development-and-validation-in-early-stage-breast-cancer/"
        },
        {
          "label": "Announcement",
          "url": "https://agendia.com/agendia-ai-driven-digital-pathology-esmo-2026/"
        }
      ],
      "illustrationURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/images/research/digital-pathology.svg",
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#publication-esmo-2026"
    },
    {
      "id": "publication-1",
      "title": "HyTAS: A Hyperspectral Image Transformer Architecture Search Benchmark and Analysis",
      "authors": [
        "Fangqin Zhou",
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Joaquin Vanschoren",
        "Ran Piao"
      ],
      "venue": "ECCV 2024",
      "year": 2024,
      "description": "We present HyTAS, a quick method for hyperspectral vision transformer architecture search.",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "arXiv",
          "url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.16269"
        },
        {
          "label": "GitHub",
          "url": "https://github.com/zhoufangqin/HyTAS/tree/main"
        }
      ],
      "illustrationURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/images/research/hytas.svg",
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#publication-1"
    },
    {
      "id": "publication-2",
      "title": "Locality-Aware Hyperspectral Classification",
      "authors": [
        "Fangqin Zhou",
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Joaquin Vanschoren"
      ],
      "venue": "BMVC 2023",
      "year": 2023,
      "description": "We propose HyLITE, a vision-transformer for hyperspectral image classification.",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "arXiv",
          "url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.01561.pdf"
        },
        {
          "label": "GitHub",
          "url": "https://github.com/zhoufangqin/HyLITE"
        }
      ],
      "illustrationURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/images/research/hylite.svg",
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#publication-2"
    },
    {
      "id": "publication-3",
      "title": "Towards Label-Efficient Incremental Learning: A Survey",
      "authors": [
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Joost van de Weijer",
        "Yuki Asano"
      ],
      "venue": "Preprint 2023",
      "year": 2023,
      "description": "We survey semi-, few-shot, and self-supervised incremental learning.",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "arXiv",
          "url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.00353.pdf"
        },
        {
          "label": "Slides",
          "url": "https://kilickaya.github.io/resume/survey.pdf"
        },
        {
          "label": "GitHub",
          "url": "https://github.com/kilickaya/label-efficient-il"
        }
      ],
      "illustrationURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/images/research/label-efficient-learning.svg",
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#publication-3"
    },
    {
      "id": "publication-4",
      "title": "Are Labels Needed for Incremental Instance Learning?",
      "authors": [
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Joaquin Vanschoren"
      ],
      "venue": "CVPRW 2023 (Oral)",
      "year": 2023,
      "description": "We introduce VINIL, a self-supervised incremental instance learner.",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "arXiv",
          "url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.11417.pdf"
        },
        {
          "label": "Slides",
          "url": "https://kilickaya.github.io/resume/slides_vinil.pdf"
        }
      ],
      "illustrationURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/images/research/vinil.svg",
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#publication-4"
    },
    {
      "id": "publication-5",
      "title": "Human-Object Interaction Detection via Weak Supervision",
      "authors": [
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Arnold Smeulders"
      ],
      "venue": "BMVC 2021",
      "year": 2021,
      "description": "We introduce Align-Former to detect human-object interactions from an image.",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "arXiv",
          "url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.00492.pdf"
        },
        {
          "label": "Slides",
          "url": "https://kilickaya.github.io/resume/slides_bmvc21.pdf"
        }
      ],
      "illustrationURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/images/research/align-former.svg",
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#publication-5"
    },
    {
      "id": "publication-6",
      "title": "Structured Visual Search via Composition-aware Learning",
      "authors": [
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Arnold Smeulders"
      ],
      "venue": "WACV 2021",
      "year": 2021,
      "description": "We introduce composition-aware learning to improve visual image search.",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "arXiv",
          "url": "https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/WACV2021/papers/Kilickaya_Structured_Visual_Search_via_Composition-Aware_Learning_WACV_2021_paper.pdf"
        },
        {
          "label": "Slides",
          "url": "https://kilickaya.github.io/resume/slides_wacv21.pdf"
        }
      ],
      "illustrationURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/images/research/composition-aware-search.svg",
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#publication-6"
    },
    {
      "id": "publication-7",
      "title": "Re-evaluating Automatic Metrics for Image Captioning",
      "authors": [
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Aykut Erdem",
        "Nazli Ikizler-Cinbis",
        "Erkut Erdem"
      ],
      "venue": "EACL 2017",
      "year": 2017,
      "description": "We propose Word-Mover Distance to evaluate image captioning.",
      "links": [
        {
          "label": "arXiv",
          "url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.07600.pdf"
        },
        {
          "label": "Slides",
          "url": "https://kilickaya.github.io/resume/slides_eacl17.pdf"
        }
      ],
      "illustrationURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/images/research/caption-evaluation.svg",
      "sourceURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/#publication-7"
    }
  ],
  "patents": [
    {
      "title": "Visual Image Search via Conversational Interaction (Huawei)",
      "authors": [
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Baiqiang XIA"
      ],
      "originalCitationLabel": "WO Patent, 2022",
      "url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023117041A1/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Network for Interacted Object Localization (Qualcomm)",
      "authors": [
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Arnold Smeulders"
      ],
      "originalCitationLabel": "US Patent, 2022",
      "url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220414371A1/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Subject-Object Interaction Recognition Model (Qualcomm)",
      "authors": [
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Stratis Gavves",
        "Arnold Smeulders"
      ],
      "originalCitationLabel": "US Patent, 2022",
      "url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US11481576B2/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Context-driven Learning of Human-object Interactions (Qualcomm)",
      "authors": [
        "Mert Kilickaya",
        "Noureldien Hussein",
        "Stratis Gavves",
        "Arnold Smeulders"
      ],
      "originalCitationLabel": "US Patent, 2021",
      "url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/EP4058930A1/"
    }
  ],
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    {
      "name": "Evangelos Tsimpouris",
      "profileURL": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/evangelos-tsimpouris-141a75190/?originalSubdomain=nl",
      "degreeAndInstitution": "MSc, TU/e",
      "period": "2023-2024",
      "project": "Learning to Transfer for Continual Learning",
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    {
      "name": "Fangqin Zhou",
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      "name": "Ceren Gok-Yildirim",
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      "name": "Kishan Parshotam",
      "profileURL": "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=75hA5MQAAAAJ&hl=en",
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      "period": "2020-2021",
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      "name": "Tarun Krishna",
      "profileURL": "https://krishnatarun.github.io/",
      "degreeAndInstitution": "MSc, UvA",
      "period": "2019-2020",
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  "photographyURL": "https://kilickaya.github.io/images.html",
  "sourceNotes": [
    "Research goals describe a direction of work, not a claim of solved or deployed capabilities.",
    "Dates retain their available precision. A null endDate for a current role means ongoing; other null fields mean no value is supplied on the website.",
    "The CV is an existing PDF and may lag the career information on the homepage.",
    "The ESMO 2026 abstract is linked to Agendia’s publication page. Its presenter is credited separately; the full author list and journal/DOI record are not supplied.",
    "The publication archive is the archive on this website, not a claim to include every subsequent work.",
    "Patent citation labels are preserved from the original archive and are not independently verified jurisdiction or grant dates."
  ]
}