Itir Onal Ertugrul

Bio

I’m an Assistant Professor at Social and Affective Computing Group, Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University. Prior to joining UU, I was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University. I was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University working with Jeffrey Cohn, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Affect Analysis Group, University of Pittsburgh and a visiting Ph.D. student at Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics Group, TU Delft. I received my B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Computer Engineering Department at Middle East Technical University.

Research Interests

• Affective Computing
• Machine Learning
• Human Behavior Understanding

News

• [May 2025] Our paper titled “DCTdiff: Intriguing Properties of Image Generative Modeling in the DCT Space” has been accepted at ICML 2025. For code check here.
• [Apr 2025] Our paper titled “Revisiting Representation Learning and Identity Adversarial Training for Facial Behavior Understanding” has been accepted at FG 2025. For code check here.
• [Jan 2025] I received the NWO SSH Open Competition XS Grant with my project “Advancing ADHD Assessment in Children: Behavior Modeling of Parent-Child Interactions”!
• [Oct 2024] Our paper on predicting vasovagal reactions to needles from videos has been published at PLOS ONE.
• [Aug 2024] Ronald Poppe and I received the Dynamics of Youth (DoY) Early Childhood Grant! We will work on predicting development of children at the age of 3 years, by observing their interactions with a parent when they were 5 months old.
• [Aug 2024] Our paper titled “Video Swin Transformers in Pain Detection: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Effectiveness, Generalizability, and Explainability” has been accepted at Workshop on Automated Assessment of Pain at ACII 2024.
• [Apr 2024] PyAFAR is released! It features the first publicly available infant action unit (AU) detector. For more information on how to install and use it, check our website.
• [Apr 2024] Our paper titled “Multimodal prediction of obsessive-compulsive disorder, comorbid depression, and energy of deep brain stimulation” has been accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. Preprint can be found here.

Selected Publications

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