Alper Demir | İzmir Institute of Technology

About Me

I am currently an Assistant Professor at İzmir Institute of Technology. I worked as a post doctoral researcher in the Autonomous Agents Research Group at the University of Edinburgh between August 2024 and July 2025 and as Assistant Professor at Izmir University of Economics between 2020 and 2026.

I have received my B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University, in 2014, 2016 and 2019, respectively. During my graduate years, I have worked as a Teaching Assistant in the same department and studied Reinforcement Learning, and Fully and Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes.

News

[July 2026] Our paper called “Effective Exploration via Intrinsic Motivation in Reinforcement Learning” is published in Journal of Advanced Research in Natural and Applied Sciences.
[June 2026] Our two papers in ICHORA 2026 are now available in IEEE Xplore.
[June 2026] Our study titled as “Fairness over Equality: Correcting Social Incentives in Asymmetric Sequential Social Dilemmas” is published in AAMAS 2026 proceedings.
[Jan 2026] Our study titled as “Reinforcement Learning for Autoscaling in Cloud Environments: A Case Study from Industry” is published in IEEE Xplore.
[Jan 2026] Our study titled as “Multi-Dimensional Autoscaling in Microservices Using Reinforcement Learning” is published in IEEE Xplore.
[May 2025] Our study using RL to solve voltage issues in distribution networks is published online.
[Oct. 2024] Our papers about traffic patterns and water consumption in Izmir are published online.
[Feb. 2023] Our paper about self memory management with intrinsic motivation is published online.
[Dec. 2022] Our paper on behavior analysis of İzmir residents is published online.

Weekly Schedule

Time	Monday	Tuesday	Friday
08:45 - 09:30
09:45 - 10:30			CENG567
10:45 - 11:30		Office Hour	CENG567
11:45 - 12:30			CENG567
13:30 - 14:15	CENG211	Berkay Arda (MSc)
14:30 - 15:15	CENG211	Tural Haciyev (MSc)
15:30 - 16:15	CENG211
16:30 - 17:15
17:30 - 18:15
18:30 - 19:15

Teaching

Courses at IUE

Academic Service

Conference Reviewing

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2022)
European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (2021, 2022)
International Informatics and Software Engineering Conference (2022)
Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (2025)

Journal Reviewing

Applied Intelligence (2023, 2024)
Artificial Intelligence Review (2024)
International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics (2024)
Artificial Intelligence Communications (2024)
Knowledge-based Systems (2024)
Machine Learning (2024)

Research

I work on improving the quality and speed of reinforcement learning in fully and partially observable environments. My work extends to intrinsically motivated agents, multi-agent problems and application of RL. I am also interested in data science.

Research Interests

Data Science
Machine Learning
Reinforcement Learning
Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning

Projects

"Solving Asymmetric Social Dilemmas in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Local Information", Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program for Turkish Citizens, 2024 - 2025, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
"Forming Useful Memory in Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning", Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), Grant No: 120E427, 2021 - 2023, İzmir, Turkey
"YÖK Program Ve Kontenjan Yonetim Sistemi (YÖK Pkys)", Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), Grant No: 115G086, 2018 - 2019, Ankara, Turkey
"Subgoal Identification in Sequential Decision Making under Partial Observability", Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), Grant No: 215E250, 2016 - 2018, Ankara, Turkey