She joined TU Darmstadt as a full Professor on “Multimodal Grounded Learning”, further supported by a €2M LOEWE Start Professorship. Prior to that she was a Research Scientist at UC Berkeley, working with Prof. Trevor Darrell. She had completed her PhD at Max Planck Institute for Informatics under supervision of Prof. Bernt Schiele. Her research is at the intersection of vision and language. She had worked on a variety of tasks, including image and video description, visual grounding, visual question answering and text-to-image synthesis. She is interested in building explainable models, diagnosing and addressing bias, and developing new multimodal models that can learn from language advice.

Ece is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Utrecht University. Previously, she was a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the Dialogue Modelling Group. Her research interests lie in multimodal Natural Language Processing. She investigates and models the processes involved in image description generation and multimodal dialogue. She is inspired by the relation between visual and linguistic processes and the role of attention in human cognition when integrating vision and language in deep neural networks. She also works on incorporating cognitive signals such as eye-tracking data into multimodal models.