Cihan Topal is currently an associate professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Engineering at Istanbul Technical University, Turkey.
Previously, he was a faculty member in the Department of EEE, at Eskisehir Technical University, Turkey.
He worked as a research fellow in the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey, UK in 2019-2020; and worked as a research intern in Real-time Vision and Modeling Department, Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ, USA in 2008.
He received his BSc degree in EEE from Anadolu University, Eskisehir, Turkey in 2005 and joined the faculty as a research assistant in the same department.
He received his MSc and PhD degrees in the department of computer engineering in 2008 and 2014, where both of his theses were supported by The Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK).
In 2014, he founded Visea, a tech start-up aims to develop computer vision systems with the scientific and technical know-how acquired by ongoing research activities.
Among others, Visea primarily focuses on applications of machine vision, human-computer interaction and augmented reality.
In 2016, Cihan received a scholarship from the Newton Fund to participate in the Leaders in Innovation Fellowships (LIF) program, an entrepreneurship and technology commercialization program run by the Royal Academy of Engineering in London.
In 2021, the image feature extraction and validation algorithms that Dr. Topal contributed to the development were integrated into the popular computer vision library OpenCV.
Dr. Topal has more than 70 publications published in refereed journals and conferences, five international patents and 2000+ citations to them.