Yagiz was born in Izmir, many many years back and recently (in June 2009) received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from Polytechnic Institute of NYU and he is currently working as a research staff engineer at Arcon. Prior to joining Arcon, he was working as a post-doctoral researcher at Information Systems and Internet Security Lab (ISIS) at Polytechnic Institute of NYU. He received his BS and MS degrees in industrial engineering from Galatasaray University and systems and control engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 1998 and 2002, respectively.

His research topics are mostly in the intersection of the general area of signal processing, pattern recognition and information theory and its application to real-world problems such as; biometrics, digital multimedia forensics, and security. More specifically, his research interests include designing efficient and secure template protection schemes for biometric systems; method-specific feature selection/extraction and dimension reduction techniques; tamper detection and source identification in digital multimedia.

In the earlier stage of his graduate studies, he also focused on systems and control theory and especially interested in nonlinear/chaotic dynamics and robust controller design for uncertain systems. And currently, he is working on many aspects of the target tracking problem.