Professor of Computer Engineering · MEF University

Muhittin
Gökmen

Teaching machines to see faces, people and human behaviour.

Vice Rector for Research at MEF University, Istanbul. Thirty years of computer vision research, from face recognition and person re-identification to behaviour analysis from video, and now leading MEF's AI Competency Framework.

Download CV Explore my research
Portrait of Prof. Dr. Muhittin Gökmen
30+years as a professor and researcher, since 1992
9PhD theses supervised
46MSc theses supervised
20+funded projects: DARPA, NSF, UNDP, TÜBİTAK

What I work on

Research

Behaviour analysis from video

Measuring facial and head movement in video to understand social and communicative behaviour.

Current focus

Kinesics and autism research

Detecting autism from head movements, with the Center for Autism Research at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

ICMI 2024

Faces and person re-identification

Illumination- and pose-invariant face recognition, and recognising people across cameras with semantic parsing.

CVPR 2018 · Pattern Recognition

Current work

MEF University AI Competency Framework

I lead the design and rollout of MEF's AI competency framework. From the 2026–27 cohort, every MEF student graduates with assessed AI competency, so they use AI critically and productively in their own field.

20/80Shared AI core, plus discipline-specific content from each department
4Proficiency levels, assessed every year
2Certificates at graduation
100%Of students and departments

Watch

Talks and interviews

All 14 videos →
Jul 28, 2026 · Sözcü TV studio, Istanbul Sözcü TV Tercih 2026: Flipped Learning and AI Competency in Engineering Education
Jul 23, 2026CNN Türk Tercih Zamanı: MEF University's Vision for Education May 15, 2026MEF TEKMER Technology Talks: In the Age of AI, Ordinary Has No Chance Feb 23, 2026Panel: Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Jul 25, 2025NTV Doğru Tercih: Why Career-Focused Education Matters

Career

From Istanbul to Pittsburgh and back

  1. 1982BSc, Istanbul Technical University
  2. 1990PhD, University of Pittsburgh
  3. 1999Professor of Computer Engineering, ITU
  4. 2001Dean, Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, ITU
  5. 2004Founded Divit at ITU ARI Teknokent
  6. 2014Joined MEF University as Department Chair
  7. 2023Sabbatical, Center for Autism Research, CHOP / UPenn
  8. 2025Vice Rector for Research, MEF University

Full biography →

Read

Selected publications

All publications → Google Scholar →
  1. 2024Detecting Autism from Head Movements using KinesicsACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI)
  2. 2018Human Semantic Parsing for Person Re-identificationIEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
  3. 2012Class Dependent Factor Analysis and Its Application to Face RecognitionPattern Recognition, 45
  4. 1997λτ-Space Representation of Images and Generalized Edge DetectionIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 19(6)