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EuroVis Young Researcher Award 2019 – Cagatay Turkay

Cagatay Turkay completed a PhD in Visualization (University of Bergen; 2013), a MSc. in Computer Science & Engineering (Sabanci University, Istanbul; 2009), and a BSc. in Computer Science (Middle East Technical University, Ankara; 2006). He has also served as a visiting research fellow at Harvard University in 2013. Currently, he is a Senior Lecturer at the giCentre, Department of Computer Science, City University of London.

Cagatay’s research falls under the broad area of Visual Data Science and focuses on designing visualisations, interactions, and computational methods to enable an effective combination of human and machine capabilities to facilitate data-intensive problem solving. He tries to understand how people make decisions together with algorithms, investigates the role of interactive visual computing in this process, and designs and builds techniques and solutions that are informed by this foundational understanding. He has a special interest in high-dimensional, temporal data from bioinformatics and the biomolecular modelling domain.

Cagatay has a strong and rapidly growing reseach und publication record, where he is publishing at the best venues in our field. Examples include the IEEE Visualization Conference, the EG/VGTC Conference on Visualization, the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics Journal, and the Computer Graphics Forum Journal. He is involved as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator in a set of funded reseach projects in the field of interactive visualization.
Cagatay has been taking an active role in providing services for the visualization community at large and for EuroVis in special. He has been guest editor for various journals and has served as program committee member for EuroVis and other high-level conferences such as IEEE Visualization and BioVis. Furthermore he provided his knowledge in expert panels of prestigious funding initiatives, like the ERC and H2020 programs. He has already acted as paper chair and general chair at several scientific events in our field.

Starting with his excellent PhD thesis on “Integrating Computational Tools in Interactive and Visual Methods for Enhancing High-dimensional Data and Cluster Analysis”, he is providing influential contributions to the visual analysis of high-dimensional data. The dual investigation of high-dimensional data simultaneously in items space and dimensions space is a highly innovative result in this respect. At the same time, he is keen on applying his orignal theoretical results to relevant real-world applications (Smart Cities, Cyber Security, Financial Markets). His work in Visual Data Science is at the forefront of combining and integrating Machine Learning and Visual Analytics.

EuroVis is pleased to recognize Cagatay Turkay with the EuroVis Young Researcher Award 2019.