About Me

I am a Ph.D. student in Aerospace Engineering at Embry-Riddle, focusing on robust perception and uncertainty quantification in unstructured planetary terrains. Previously, I was involved in perception stacks for major EU-HORIZON projects at TUBITAK BILGEM.

Computer Vision Deep Learning State Estimation Robotics ROS2

Experience & Education

Ph.D. Aerospace Engineering

2025–Pres

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, FL, USA

Full tuition waiver. Developing uncertainty-aware deep learning frameworks for robotic perception.

Robotics Researcher

2021–2024

TUBITAK BILGEM, Turkey

Participated perception stack for 5+ EU-HORIZON projects (~100M€). Mentored 25+ engineers on ROS2/CV workflows.

M.Sc. Computer Engineering

2021–2024

Bogazici University, Turkey

GPA: 4.0/4.0. Thesis on Occlusion-Aware Benchmarking.

B.Sc. Computer Engineering

2016–2021

Bogazici University, Turkey

GPA: 3.21/4.0. Thesis on Adversarial Robustness in Deep Learning.

Selected Publications

2025
Learning Rock Pushability on Rough Planetary Terrain
E. Girgin, T. Girgin, C. Kilic
ICRA Workshop on Field Robotics
2025
EdgeAI Drone for Autonomous Construction Site Demonstrator
E. Girgin, A. T. Candan, C. A. Zaman
ICRA Workshop on Future of Construction
2024
Detection and Quantification of Occlusion for 3D Human Pose
E. Girgin, B. Gokberk, L. Akarun
ICPR Workshop on FBE

Honors & Service

Outstanding Paper Award (3rd Place) IEEE SIU, 2023
Reviewer Elsevier Journal of Digital Signal Processing, 2023
Top 0.15% (Rank 292 / 200k+) National Graduate Exam, 2021
Top 0.01% (Rank 349 / 2.5M+) National Undergraduate Exam, 2016

Projects

Rock Segmentation

ROS2 package to segment rocks and extract surface characteristics.

Vision Robotics
Code

Occlusion Index

Tool for 3D Human Pose and Shape (HPS) occlusion measurement.

Vision
Code

Saliency Attack

Scoring-based black-box adversarial attack using PyTorch.

PyTorch
Code

SMPL Blender

Rendering pipeline for SMPL human models.

Blender Graphics
Code

Tutorials

Blog: Life beyond robotics