Yilmaz, Alper

Biography

Dr. Yilmaz is Professor with appointments in Civil Environmental and Geodetic Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering (courtesy) Departments at The Ohio State University. He has been inducted to the U.S. National Academy of Inventors in 2020, is a Fellow of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) and is a senior member of IEEE. Dr. Yilmaz is currently interim president for the ISPRS Technical Commission II. He is serving as Editor-In-Chief for the Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing Journal (PE&RS). During his leadership of the PE&RS journal, the impact factor has increased to its highest since its first volume in 1934. In 2019, PE&RS was ranked 19th most downloaded journal among all 11,000 titles on Ingenta Connect Platform. He has served as Associate Editor for the Computer Vision and Image Understanding Journal between 2014 and 2016 and the Machine Vision and Applications Journal between 2006 and 2011.

Based on a recent study from Stanford University and Elsevier (published on October 19, 2021), Dr. Yilmaz is listed among the top 2% most cited researchers in the fields of “Artificial Intelligence & Image Processing” and “Geological & Geomatics Engineering” in both career-long (1960-2021) and single year (2021) categories. The ranking covers 22 major fields and 176 subfields. 

His recent research on biomimetic navigation systems has resulted in a successful start-up, UbiHere Inc., which is an Ohio State University spin-off. He founded UbiHere in 2018 and is serving as the board member and TCO since its inception. After the initial seed funding and private funding round, UbiHere-designed hardware and software products UbiTrax, UbiVision and UbiStats are being installed are US Air Force bases and hospital systems across the nation for tracking and localization of assets and personnel.

Dr. Yilmaz has been awarded the Outstanding Service Award in 2022 by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, the Innovator of Year (OSU) – annually given only to one faculty across the university – in 2020, Presidential citation in 2019 from the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, honorable mention for the Masao Horiba Award (Japan) in 2016, the Lumley Interdisciplinary Research Award (OSU) in 2015, and theLumley Research Award (OSU) in 2012. He has advised 23 PhD and 15 M.Sc. students to completion on topics ranging from photogrammetry, machine learning and computer vision who have found position in prominent academic institutions, industry, and the government.

 

Extramural Funding

The research in PCVLab laboratory is supported by the Government and Industry. We greatly thank our partners in research who funded our former and current projects:

Expertise

Dr. Yilmaz’s research focuses on biomimetic navigation systems for unmanned systems, mining anomalies in multi-physics, and multi-dimensional data for surveillance and learning geospatial information for scene understanding. On these topics, he has organized a number of conferences in the fields of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing, and Computer Vision. Dr. Yilmaz’s research has received over $13M in extramural funding from NASA, NSF, DOD, DOE, and industry which resulted in over 190 publications and patents that received over 12,000 citations (according to Google Scholar).

Research Interests:

  • Deep Learning 
  • Reinforcement Learning 
  • Computer Vision
  • Photogrammetry
  • Data-centric Surveillance
  • Collaborative Swarm Navigation
  • Indoor Positioning Systems
  • GPS denied Global Positioning Systems