Prof.Dr. Nafiz Arıca

Dean of Faculty of Engineering and Natural Science, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey

Artificial Intelligence in Sustainable Energy

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a significant impact on achieving sustainable development goals. Shaping many sectors, AI is one of the most important technologies in the transformation of the energy sector for sustainable development. Intelligent software is used in many areas from energy production to supply and demand management, from integration of renewable resources to price estimation. As sustainable energy is predicted to become the essential provider of global energy demand, the role of AI is paramount in accelerating, maintaining and expanding this adoption on which civilization is run on clean and dependable energy with minimal impact on the environment.  In this presentation, the applications of Artificial Intelligence, especially for sustainable energy purposes, how AI techniques outperform the classical models and the future directions will be discussed.

Prof. Dr. Nafiz Arica received the BSc degree from the Turkish Naval Academy in 1991. He worked for the Navy as communications and combat officer for four years. In 1995, he joined the Middle East Technical University (METU) where he received both MSc and PhD degrees in computer engineering. His thesis was awarded the thesis of the year in 1998 at METU. He conducted research as a postdoctoral associate both at the Beckman Institute of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL and at the Department of Information Science of Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA. From 2004 to 2013 he worked as a faculty member of Computer Engineering Department at the Turkish Naval Academy, Istanbul. He is now working as Professor in Computer Engineering Department at Bahcesehir University. He also holds the position of dean at the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences.
The general theme of his research is to develop intelligent systems with a focus on “seeing”. In accordance with this ultimate goal, his research interests include various subjects in Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Autonomous Agents. During his research career, he has worked on many problems that have real-world applications in these areas. In particular, the problems, he has addressed covers image/object representation and classification, deep learning, human activity analysis, detecting and tracking moving objects for video surveillance, facial expression analysis. In addition he has studied on simulation and modeling of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight paths, and path planning algorithms.
For his research, he combines the rigor of basic sciences with the innovative and practical aspects of engineering.  His general goal in research is to develop novel techniques based on probabilistic models and engineering approaches. He pursues his research based on three pillars: analysis of real world problems, development of computational models and experimentation on large set of real data.