Bahar İrfan
Senior Research Scientist at Familiar Machines & Magic
United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolBahar İrfan is a senior research scientist and roboticist (PhD) with nine years of applied experience building personalized, long-term human-robot interactions and deploying robots in real-world health, service, and social settings. She combines mechanical, computer engineering, and AI expertise to create continual-learning personal agents, having published widely (20 conferences, 6 journals), won multiple best-paper awards, and accrued 800+ citations. Her work spans foundation models and conversational AI to multimodal user recognition and lifelong learning, including the first conversational robot integrated with GPT-3.5 evaluated with older adults and a multi-modal open-world user recognition system that outperformed state of the art in three deployments. She has led impactful longitudinal studies and field trials—improving patient outcomes in a 2.5-year cardiac rehab deployment and enabling personalized barista robots in a campus cafeteria—while open-sourcing benchmarks and coordinating leading HRI workshops to advance community standards.
9 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Exchange Student, Mechanical Engineering, Exchange Student, Mechanical Engineering at Purdue UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Robotics/Computing, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Robotics/Computing at University of PlymouthMaster of Science - MS, Computer Engineering, Master of Science - MS, Computer Engineering at Boğaziçi University
English, French, Turkish
Github Skills (6)
chat8
signal8
messaging8
messenger7
swift7
ios6
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
birfan/MultimodalRecognition
Mar 2019 - Oct 2021
Contributions:23 commits in 2 years 8 months
birfan/BaristaDatasets
Feb 2020 - Oct 2021
Contributions:13 commits, 2 pushes in 1 year 8 months
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