Emir Kısa

About

Currently a Research Fellow at UIUC, working on diffusion-based video generation and latent-space refinement for temporal coherence across clips. Before that, founding engineer at SOLACE, where I designed wake word models trained on 192K curated samples, built low-latency avatar inference with state interpolation, and deployed agentic voice assistants. Raised $250K pre-seed and shipped to real users.

I live at the intersection of research and startups.

EEE, Boğaziçi University. Also like math, philosophy, music (guitar and vocals), and being human.

GitHub ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Email ↗ YouTube ↗

Experience

Research Fellow

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Researching diffusion-based video generation for semantic clip-to-clip transitions. Developing latent-space refinement techniques to improve temporal coherence without retraining.

Jan 2026 — Present

Current

Founding AI Engineer

SOLACE · Istanbul

Helped secure $250K pre-seed. Led design and deployment of the full AI stack: low-latency avatar generation with state interpolation, wake word engine trained on 192K curated samples, and agentic voice assistants via WebRTC/WebSocket with BERT-class models.

Nov 2024 — Aug 2025

AI Developer

Hirize · United States

Document intelligence pipelines using transformers, OCR, and custom entity extraction. Took research-grade NLP to enterprise-scale production.

Nov 2023 — Jul 2024

AI Intern

Turkish Aerospace · Istanbul

Post-earthquake UAV small-object detection. Extended YOLOv5 with custom cross-attention layers and a P2 feature map, lifting mAP from 70% to 78%.

Aug — Sep 2023

ML & Data Science

Turkish Technology · Istanbul

Fraud detection models deployed into production workflows.

Jan — Aug 2023

Undergraduate Researcher

DeepMIA Lab · Boğaziçi University

Built visual AI foundations from scratch — CNNs, backprop, custom loss functions, semantic segmentation architectures, and VAE/diffusion experiments. Under Dr. Mehmet Turan and Dr. Yasin Almalıoğlu (Oxford).

Sep 2022 — Apr 2023

Research Intern

ITU Aerospace Research Center · Istanbul

Jul — Aug 2022

Projects

Ensi / EMA — SOLACE

Real-time voice AI: smart home assistant and interactive shopping agent. Raised $250K.

2024–25

Tercihify

AI university preference tool — analyzes student interests against official program data to build ranked shortlists.

2024

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