YILDIRAY YILDIZ

Associate Professor

Yıldıray Yıldız

BIOGRAPHY

Yildiray Yildiz is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering Department at Bilkent University. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with Mathematics minor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. He worked at NASA Ames Research Center, employed by UC Santa Cruz, one year as a postdoctoral scholar and four years as an Associate Scientist, until he joined Bilkent University in 2014.

Professor Yildiz is the recipient of an ASME best student paper award for his work on “Automotive Powertrain Control Problems Involving Time Delay: An Adaptive Control Approach” and a NASA Group Achievement Award “for outstanding technology development of the CAPIO system at the Vertical Motion Simulator supporting NASA's Green Aviation Initiative.” He has served in program committees for several conferences and is a reviewer for several journals. He was a member of the AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Technical Committee from 2010 through 2013. He has been an IEEE Conference Editorial Board Associate Editor since 2015 and an Associate Editor for IEEE Control Systems Magazine since 2016.

PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS: If you are interested, please send me a short email (yyildiz@bilkent.edu.tr) describing your research interests together with your CV. Undergraduates are also welcome. If you are a good programmer, please indicate that in your email (this is not a requirement).

OPEN POSTDOCTORAL POSITIONS: I seek candidates with strong programming skills together with an interest in reinforcement learning and game theory. I am particularly interested in candidates who can apply his/her computer skills on solving problems in prediction of the behavior of complex dynamical systems. Please contact me (yyildiz@bilkent.edu.tr) if you are interested.

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering (Minor: Mathematics), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009
M.S., Mechatronics, Sabanci University, 2004
B.S. (First Rank), Mechanical Engineering, Middle East Technical University, 2002

RESEARCH

Yildiray's research focus is on prediction and control of complex systems, whose dynamics are hard to describe, predict or control. In particular, Yildiray is interested in control theory, game theory and reinforcement learning, on the theory side, and their applications to aerospace, automotive and robotics fields, on the engineering side. He has conducted research in these areas in close collaboration with colleagues at MIT, University of Michigan and NASA.

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