👤 About Me

I'm a PhD candidate, enrolled at Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Leiden University. My research focuses on tailoring chatbots responses to users' personal and emotional needs, under different tasks and domains. My areas of interest are:

1. Understanding how emotions, personality, and the context shape individual differences in user perception of chatbots
2. Exploring the effect of personalization and anthropomorphism on user perception of chatbots
3. Understanding how and why people interact with chatbots
4. Designing personalized and adaptive chatbots

Continuing my PhD, I aim to bridge AI and user psychology to design better user experiences. With a BSc in Computer Engineering and an MSc in Computer Vision, I now focus on NLP, working with LLMs and RAG. 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—an experience that highlighted the value of user-aware AI systems. My long-standing interest in psychology led me to conduct user studies on chatbot perception, exploring how expectations vary across individuals.

📚 Publications

• 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