Mehmet Haklıdır

Founding Director, Artificial Intelligence Institute

TÜBİTAK BİLGEM Artificial Intelligence Institute

Biography

Dr. Mehmet Haklıdır is the founding Director of the TÜBİTAK BİLGEM Artificial Intelligence Institute, Türkiye’s first national AI institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Control and Automation Engineering from Istanbul Technical University and has more than 24 years of experience in AI, autonomous systems, big data, simulation, and technology policy.

He contributed to Türkiye’s first National AI Strategy and led the technical preparation and coordination of the National Artificial Intelligence Action Plan 2026–2030, finalized through consultation with the national AI ecosystem. He serves on the Steering Committee of the Science, Technology and Innovation Policies Council of the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye and is a member of several international AI governance initiatives, including OECD ONE AI, GPAI, UNESCO AI Ethics, NATO DAIRB, and the European AI Alliance.

His current research focuses on large language models, AI safety with an emphasis on agentic AI systems, deep reinforcement learning, robotics, and autonomous decision-making under uncertainty.

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Education

PhD, Control and Automation Engineering

2011–2022

Istanbul Technical University

MSc, Mechatronics Engineering

2003–2006

Istanbul Technical University

BSc, Mechanical Engineering (minor in Computer Science)

1999–2003

Istanbul University

Research interests

Large Language Models AI Safety & Agentic AI Systems Deep Reinforcement Learning Robotics & Autonomous Systems Decision-Making under Uncertainty AI Governance & Policy

Research

Agentic AI safety and governance, reinforcement learning for autonomous systems, and applied AI for language, health and the geosciences.

Agentic AI Safety & Governance

How consent, oversight and accountability hold up when AI systems act on people’s behalf and interact with each other.

Consent Multi-agent systems Human oversight +1 more

7 papers

Reinforcement Learning & Autonomous Systems

Decision-making under uncertainty and partial observability for autonomous vehicles, robots and control.

Deep RL POMDPs Autonomous driving +1 more

12 papers

AI for Geoscience & Energy

Machine learning and control for geothermal systems: reservoir temperature, contamination and scaling.

Geothermal systems Reservoir temperature GANs +1 more

18 papers

Language Technologies & LLMs

Turkish language models, embedding benchmarks and multimodal language analysis.

Turkish LLMs Text embeddings Benchmarks

4 papers

AI for Health

Privacy-preserving and trustworthy AI for clinical prediction, medical imaging and digital twins.

Federated learning Digital twins Medical imaging

16 papers

Computer Vision & Applied AI

Applied machine learning with industry and public partners, from livestock tracking to smart appliances.

Object tracking Soft sensors Anomaly detection

9 papers

Modeling, Simulation & Control

High-fidelity simulation, computer generated forces and control (2003–2015).

Simulation Computer generated forces Underwater vehicles

25 papers

Selected Publications

Mehmet Haklıdır, Osman Gazi Güçlütürk (2026). The Consent Vacuum: When Agents Interact Without Humans. IAIL 2026 @ HHAI 2026.

Mehmet Haklıdır (2026). Consent Chain Degradation in Embodied Multi-Agent Systems: Bridging the Gap Between AI Agent Governance and Robot Ethics. ICRA 2026 WoRoBet.

Preprint

Mehmet Haklıdır (2026). When Does Adaptive Guidance Help? Belief-Aware Privileged Distillation for Autonomous Driving Under Partial Observability. CVPR 2026 WAD.

Preprint

Ömer Arslan, Atalay Çelik, Yusuf Aslan, Hasan Fatih Durkaya, Mustafa Furkan Zenginoğlu, Musa Alperen Yılmaz, Merve Gül Kantarcı, Mehmet Haklıdır (2026). TR-TEB: Turkish Text Embedding Benchmark. LREC 2026, 11028-11044.

PDF Source Document DOI

Füsun Servin Tut Haklıdır, Mehmet Haklıdır (2026). Advancing geothermal reservoir temperature prediction in the Western Anatolia (Türkiye) using synthetic hydrogeochemical data from rank–Gaussian copulas. Geothermics, 141, 103760.

Mehmet Haklıdır (2026). Who Is Accountable When the Agent Speaks? Toward Accountability Graphs for Conversational AI Chains. CUI 2026, 1-5.

DOI