Erhan Öztop

Erhan Öztop is a Professor at Özyeğin University's Computer Science Department and Co-Director of the Ozyegin University Robotics Laboratory. He holds a Specially Appointed Professor position at Osaka University's Symbiotic Intelligent Systems Research Center. Previously, he worked at Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) in Japan from 2002-2011, leading as Vice Head of the Communication and Cognitive Cybernetics Department.

He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering (2002) from the University of Southern California, M.S. in Computer Engineering (1996) from METU, and B.S. in Computer Engineering + Mathematics (1993) from METU. His research focuses on computational modeling of intelligent behavior, human-robot adaptation, cognitive neuroscience, and machine learning.

His work explores visuomotor learning, mirror neuron systems, grasp affordance learning, and human-in-the-loop robot control. Key projects include:

• Dexterous manipulation via human-robot body schema integration
• Mental state inference using visual control parameters
• Motor interference as a metric for human-like robot perception
• Sign representation of Boolean functions

Recent publications emphasize human-robot co-adaptation, emotion modeling, and affordance-based architectures for collaborative systems. His work bridges robotics, cognitive neuroscience, and machine learning to develop biologically inspired intelligent systems.