Prof. Ufuk SAKARYA

Ufuk Sakarya was born in 1976. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from Middle East Technical University in 1998 and 2002 respectively. During his M.Sc. thesis, he worked on constructing of surface topography from multiple images that are illuminated from different light source directions. He received his Ph.D. degree in electronics engineering from Ankara University in 2009. In his Ph.D. thesis, graph theoretic three video scene detection methods were proposed to detect high-level temporal video segments. He was Assoc. Prof. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at TÜBİTAK UZAY in 2018. 

He worked at Yildiz Technical University, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Department of Aviation Electronics as an Assoc. Prof. Dr. between March 2019 and April 2024. He has also been Head of Department of Aviation Electronics since 20 March 2019. He is the first Head of Department of Aviation Electronics. He has also been The Member of Board of Administration and The Member of Board of Faculty of Faculty of Applied Sciences since 20 August 2019. He has currently worked at Yildiz Technical University, Faculty of Electrical and Electronics, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering as a Prof. Dr. since 02 April 2024. 

His main research topics are pattern recognition, remote sensing, computer vision, avionics, image and video processing, forensic science. He has co-authored more than 60 publications in the related areas. 

He worked at TÜBİTAK UZAY (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye, Space Technologies Research Institute) as a researcher between 1998 and 2009. He completed the military service in 2010. After the military service, he worked at TÜBİTAK UZAY until 1 March 2019. He was a Group Leader in Remote Sensing Group of TÜBİTAK UZAY between 02 March 2015 and 05 September 2018. He has basically worked on the projects that are closely related with image and video processing. He was working in the related projects as project manager, system designer and software developer. He has worked as a chief researcher on the project of developing an automated firearms identification system called by “Balistika 2010”. He has also worked on the images of RASAT, which is the first earth observation satellite built in Türkiye. He studied on the radiometric calibration of GÖKTÜRK-2 satellite sensor. He worked on the hyperspectral image processing and dimension reduction methods in high-dimensional data processing. In addition, he worked on developing of TÜRKSAT 6A which is the first communication satellite building in Türkiye. 

He was a chairman and member of BHİKPK – BARKOK (Coordination and Planning Committee of Map Works Inter Ministries - Scientific Research and Coordination Commission) in Türkiye between 2015 and 2017. He has also been United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) Drafting Committee Member of Asia-Pacific Plan of Action for Space Applications for Sustainable Development (2018-2030) in 2018. In addition, he was Group on Earth Observations (GEO) European High Level Working Group (HLWG) Member of Türkiye in 2018.  

He speaks Turkish (Native) and English. He is married and he has two children.