Billur Barshan

Billur Barshan is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bilkent University's Faculty of Engineering in Ankara, Turkey. She leads the Robotics and Sensing Research Laboratory and has established herself as a leading researcher in intelligent sensing, wearable technologies, and robotics.

Dr. Barshan received her B.S. degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Physics from Boğaziçi University. She continued her education at Yale University, where she earned her M.S., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford's Robotics Research Group, she joined Bilkent University.

Dr. Barshan's research focuses on intelligent sensing systems, particularly in the areas of wearable sensing, human activity recognition, fall detection, and multi-sensor data fusion. Her work bridges theoretical signal processing with practical applications in healthcare and robotics. She has developed innovative approaches for processing data from miniature sensors to recognize activities invariant to sensor placement and orientation, addressing key challenges in practical wearable systems.

Her recent publications demonstrate a progression from fundamental sensor processing to sophisticated machine learning approaches, with emphasis on deep learning architectures for activity recognition, fall detection algorithms, and orientation-invariant classification. This work has significant implications for healthcare monitoring, particularly for elderly fall prevention.

Dr. Barshan has received several prestigious awards:

• Nakamura Prize (1994) for outstanding paper at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
• TÜBİTAK Incentive Award (1998) in Engineering
• METU Mustafa Parlar Foundation Research Incentive Award (1999)
• IEEE SIU Conference Best Paper Award (2001)

She has successfully supervised numerous graduate students, many of whom have gone on to successful academic and industry careers. Her research has been supported by multiple TÜBİTAK grants, and she has contributed public datasets widely used by researchers worldwide, including the Daily and Sports Activities Dataset and Simulated Falls Dataset.

She leads the Robotics and Sensing Research Laboratory at Bilkent University, focusing on intelligent sensing systems for robotics and human activity monitoring, with significant applications in healthcare, particularly for elderly fall detection and physical therapy monitoring.