Hi! I am Dilara, an Assistant Professor at Sabancı University in İstanbul, Türkiye. I am also a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK. My research interests are responsible AI, usable privacy, NLP+CSS, and human computer interaction. Previously, I was a Research Associate (Postdoc) at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. I am currently working on a Responsible AI project where we aim to make socio-technical organizations answerable for the automated actions they take where these actions can harm people. You can find more information in our launch blog.

I have a PhD from the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh with a thesis titled “Analysing Privacy in Online Social Media” (Supervised by Walid Magdy and Kami Vaniea). My PhD focused on privacy on social media, especially unintended disclosures and user understanding of privacy controls. Here is our latest published paper analysing privacy switching behaviour on Twitter. I have a blog where I relay my experiences doing research in Edinburgh, written in Turkish.

I visited the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy as a research fellow in the summer of ‘21 (Supervised by Yasemin Acar). We investigated the security and privacy perceptions of Turkish startup developers.

I received my undergraduate degree in 2015, and my master’s degree in 2017 from Boğaziçi University in Turkey (Supervised by Pınar Yolum). My master’s thesis was about preserving privacy in online social networks using multi-agent systems. The paper and the code are available. We proposed and implemented different negotiation techniques before uploading a post to OSNs so that every party involved was comfortable with the result. You can have more information about the project here.

I worked as a software engineer at Pointr for 1.5 years where we tackled the indoor navigation problem. We used Bluetooth low-energy technology to pinpoint the user’s position and navigate them to their destination. This is especially useful in places like airports and big malls.

My interests include learning new languages, cooking different cuisines, watching grand slam tennis, and playing Nintendo Switch (mainly Zelda games). I studied Japanese for five years and have acquired N2 in JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test). I also studied abroad for one semester in my undergraduate program at Hanyang University in Seoul.