👤 About Me

Hey! I am Mert, a last-year PhD candidate supervised by Frederik Situmeang and Suzan Verberne. My areas of interest are:

1. Human-AI trust calibration
2. Personalization and its impact on human-computer interaction
3. Investigating demographic differences in attitudes towards AI
4. Designing trustworthy and user-friendly AI

Thanks to my long-standing interest in psychology, I aim to bridge the gap between users and AI systems by investigating the user expectations and designing better user experiences. Before academia, I spent 2.5 years as a data scientist at a private bank, where I built and deployed a white-box credit scoring model.

📚 Publications

• The Decision to Verify: How Warmth and User Characteristics Shape Reliance on Conversational Agents for Information Search, Computers in Human Behavior (Under Review)

• I See That You Are Frustrated: An Analysis of Emotion Acknowledgment's Influence on Privacy Risk and Satisfaction, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction (Under Review)

• User-Adaptive Personalized Chatbots for Conversational Information Seeking Tasks, CHIIR'25

• Improving RAG for Personalization with Author Features and Contrastive Examples , ECIR'25

• Rethinking Conversation Styles of Chatbots from the Customer Perspective: Relationships between Conversation Styles of Chatbots, Chatbot Acceptance, and Perceived Tie Strength and Perceived Risk, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction

• The Impact of Quantization on Retrieval-Augmented Generation: An Analysis of Small LLMs, IR-RAG@SIGIR'24

🎓 Education

PhD

Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Leiden University

February 2023 - Present

MSc in Computer Vision

Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

September 2021 - September 2022

BSc in Computer Engineering

Galatasaray University

September 2013 - June 2019

💼 Work Experience

Data Scientist

Fibabanka, Istanbul, Turkey

August 2019 - December 2021