Draft · not listed
Where I'm from
Three points on a map, roughly two thousand kilometres of line connecting them, and the order matters. This is the short version of the answer to where are you from?
Lausanne · --:--
Kahramanmaraş
The starting point. A southern Turkish city tucked into the foothills, more famous abroad for ice cream than anything else. It's the place names show up on forms, the place I came back to between school years, and the reference point everything else gets measured against.
Ankara
Four years at Bilkent for the B.Sc. in Electrical & Electronics Engineering. The first real move — long bus rides at the start of each semester, a lab on visible-light positioning under Prof. Sinan Gezici, and the slow, deliberate switch from "studying engineering" to "doing research".
Lausanne
EPFL for the M.Sc. in Communication Systems, currently working in VILAB with Prof. Amir Zamir on computer vision and multimodal foundation models. A small city against a very large lake, framed by mountains that are honestly a bit unreasonable.
Why this order?
Three moves, each one a little further west and a little colder. Each move also brought a sharp change in what I was working on — from circuits and signal processing, to localization and detection, to 3D vision and foundation models — but the connecting thread has been the same: building things that perceive the world a little better than they did yesterday.
The red pin pulses because that's the current frame.