Lale Akarun

Lale Akarun is Professor of Computer Engineering at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, where she also serves as Director of the TETAM research center. She leads the Media Laboratory (MEDIALAB) and the Perceptual Intelligence Laboratory (PILAB), focusing on biometrics, sign-language recognition, computer vision and image processing.

Research Interests:

• Biometrics: 3-D Face & Hand-vein Recognition
• Gesture & Sign-Language Recognition for HCI
• Computer Vision, Image Processing & Graphics

Her recent work (2023-2025) targets robust sign-language translation via self-supervised learning, multi-cue skeleton fusion, cross-dataset transfer and attention modeling, while also contributing new benchmarks for 3-D object reconstruction and occlusion-aware human-pose estimation.

Laboratories & Teams:

• Media Laboratory (MEDIALAB)
• Perceptual Intelligence Laboratory (PILAB)

She advises graduate researchers and has released influential datasets such as BosphorusSign22k, fostering advances in Turkish sign-language recognition and low-resource transfer learning.