Mert Inan

Education

• MS in Computational Biology, Carnegie Mellon University
• BS in Computer Science, Bilkent University — Turkey

Biography

Mert Inan is a doctoral student in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston. He is advised by Malihe Alikhani.

Mert transferred from the University of Pittsburgh to Khoury College in 2023 to continue his doctoral studies, which focus on natural language processing, computational linguistics, and multimodal conversational AI. He is particularly interested in interdisciplinary projects with real-world impact; for example, he has worked on systems that combine cognitive science with conversational artificial intelligence systems, such as sign language processing and multimodal evaluation systems that combine visual and linguistic information. He hopes to make these conversational systems more human-like and cognitively aware, and to design dialogue systems for use by the deaf and hard of hearing community. Mert is also serving as a TA for the “Introduction to Computer Graphics” course, where he can gain additional exposure to practices that he employs in his research.

Mert's work has received several recognitions, including the Amazon Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge Grant after his team came in third in Amazon’s TaskBot challenge. He has also published in ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, SIGDIAL, and CogSci. Going forward, Mert is looking for new interdisciplinary applications for his computational linguistics know-how, with an eye toward improving quality of life.

In his free time, Mert loves cooking and baking international gourmet cuisine.