Yasin Yilmaz, associate professor and a distinguished faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at USF, has achieved global recognition. ScholarGPS, an academic ranking platform, has identified Yilmaz as a Highly Ranked Scholar, placing him in the top 0.05% worldwide in the field of anomaly detection (No. 4 globally with respect to publications and citations in prior five years).
Professor Yasin Yilmaz also serves as the Director of the Secure & Intelligent Systems (SIS) Lab. He has focused his research on real-time anomaly detection, adversarial machine learning, video understanding, and multimodal data fusion.
Yilmaz said “Anomaly detection is an important research topic in machine learning. It deals with detecting unexpected data and events which require attention and possibly a timely action, mimicking the salience network of the human brain. This recognition exemplifies the cutting-edge research we are doing at the USF College of Engineering.” ScholarGPS ranking system is based on over 200 million publications and more than 30 million scholars from 55,000 institutions worldwide.
Yilmaz has authored nearly 100 publications, and his research has garnered significant attention, with over 3,500 citations according to Google Scholar. This acknowledgment underscores his contributions to advancing the frontiers of machine learning and cybersecurity.
Award-Winning Research Team
In collaboration with his Ph.D. students Md Mahmuddun Nabi Murad and Justin McMillen,
Yilmaz also achieved success in an international data challenge titled "Managing Maritime Movements (M3) Hackathon", which is organized by the Department of Homeland Security. Their project focuses on predicting small vessel routes to enhance maritime safety.
The organizers of the Managing Maritime Movements (M3) Hackathon stated that “Small vessels present a significant challenge for maritime waterway management. Unlike large vessels, which have well-established trajectory forecasting models, small vessels such as sailboats, fishing vessels, and personal craft often traverse marine environments with limited traffic management capabilities.” Yilmaz also added that “This research will be very useful for the reliability of autonomous vessels. We are collaborating with maritime researchers on several topics related to the safety and efficiency of maritime transportation.”
View the M3 Hackathon Webinar Recording here.
Upcoming Conference Presentation
Continuing his lab’s success, Yilmaz, alongside Ph.D. student Murad, will present
at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in February 2025. The conference is one of the leading global forums for artificial
intelligence and machine learning.
Yilmaz said “We developed a state-of-the-art method for predicting the future values of temporal data, which not only significantly improves the performance but also improves the computational efficiency ten folds compared to the existing methods. We are very excited to present our work at the AAAI Conference on AI. Our paper was among the accepted 23% of more than 13,000 submissions.”
Dr. Chris Ferekides, chair of the Electrical Engineering Department at USF, said “Dr. Yilmaz’s is a true leader in his discipline, and he always seeks for meaningful and impactful applications for his research. Although he is a renowned expert in anomaly detection with too many applications to list here, he is also leading a collaborative effort between the Electrical Engineering Department and Moffitt Cancer Center to advance the impact of machine learning and AI in cancer applications. Along with his colleagues, he is training exceptional students who will soon be following in his footsteps. One can only look forward to what’s next from his team.”
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