Hacer Yalim Keles is a Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Hacettepe University, Türkiye. She received her B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University, in 2002, 2005, and 2010, respectively. Her Ph.D. thesis received the Thesis of the Year Award from the Prof. Dr. Mustafa Parlar Education and Research Foundation in 2010.

Between 2000 and 2007, she worked as a researcher at the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), where her research focused on pattern recognition using multimedia data, including audio and video. In 2010, she founded an R&D company with support from the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Turkey. Their SOYA project was funded by TUBITAK in 2011 and received recognition as a successful technology venture.

Her research interests include computer vision and machine learning, with a particular focus on learning from limited data, deep generative models, sign language and gesture recognition, image inpainting, and image segmentation. Beyond these primary research areas, she has also co-authored publications with her graduate students on a range of topics, including aerial and medical image analysis, speech and text processing, and geophysical data analysis. She also supports industrial research projects that apply advanced machine learning methods, including Large Language Models.