Cagan Bakirci
M.S. in Computer Science (AI) · University of Southern California · May 2026
I recently completed my Master's in Computer Science at USC. I'm affiliated with LIRA Lab and CPS-VIDA Lab, where I work with Prof. Erdem Biyik and Prof. Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh. My research spans safety-constrained reinforcement learning, uncertainty quantification for vision-language-action policies, and specification-guided reward shaping, with recent co-authored work on specification-guided robot learning currently under review.
Research
Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Locomotion
Co-authored research on reward design for learning-based quadruped locomotion.
CPS-VIDA Lab · ICRA 2027 (under review) · with Prof. Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh
Language Models for Robotic Locomotion
Co-authored research on using large language models to generate task specifications for quadruped locomotion.
CPS-VIDA Lab · LAFR Workshop, IROS 2026 · with Prof. Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh
Grounding Temporal Specifications from Video for Robot Learning
Co-authored work on converting observation-only videos into parametric temporal-logic specifications that provide interpretable rewards for robot learning across manipulation and locomotion.
CPS-VIDA Lab · ICLR 2027 (under review) · with Prof. Deshmukh and Prof. Biyik
Safe Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation
Developing methods to improve safety in learned robotic manipulation policies while maintaining task performance across benchmark environments.
LIRA Lab · with Prof. Erdem Biyik
Failure Detection for Vision-Language-Action Policies
Investigating uncertainty quantification techniques for detecting potential failures in manipulation policies conditioned on language instructions.
CPS-VIDA Lab · with Prof. Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh
Learning-based Coordination for Multi-Agent Pathfinding
Exploring learned reward functions for improving coordination in decentralized multi-agent navigation scenarios.
CPS-VIDA Lab · with Prof. Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh
Selected Projects
Projects from graduate coursework and undergraduate research
EEG-to-Text Decoding with LLM Rescoring
Optimized EEG-to-text decoding via beam search tuning and no-repeat n-gram constraints, improving non-teacher-forced BLEU-1 by 32% (relative) on ZuCo V1.
CSCI 544 · Fall 2025
Reconstructing Music from EEG Responses
Reconstructed music stimuli from EEG by mapping PSD features to mel-spectrograms; achieved 82.86% classifier accuracy and 0.80 cosine similarity, surpassing EEG2Mel baseline.
CSCI 566 · Fall 2024
Earthquake Time-to-Failure Prediction
Developed neural network models (CNN, RNN) to predict earthquake time-to-failure from seismic data. Achieved top 5% ranking in LANL Kaggle competition with strong generalization.
CMPS 242 · Spring 2019 · Kaggle Top 5%
Software & Other Projects
Artsy: Artist & Artwork Search App
Full-stack web application for searching artists and artworks via the Artsy API. Features include favorites, detailed artwork views, and responsive design.
CSCI 571 · Fall 2024
Amazon Alexa Modular Adapter
Contributed to an Amazon-sponsored accessibility device enabling voice control of switch-operated appliances for users with disabilities. Developed voice command integration using Alexa Voice Service SDK and Alexa Skills Kit.
UCSC Capstone · 2020 · Amazon-Sponsored
Industry Experience
- Promoted to Senior in two years (earliest timeline permitted by company policy)
- ComMind: Founded and led development of a dynamic, self-correcting rating system with ML models. Recognized by Sabanci University and selected for incubation at Koc University.
- Search Helper: Co-founded and developed a scalable containerized query-correction microservice using Java and Spring Boot. The service mapped misspelled user searches to the nearest meaningful searchable query, correcting 210,000+ search typos in its first month and improving search reliability by 89%.
- Oculus: Led computer vision system to automate reading of stock/serial numbers on products.
- DropShipment: Architected and led implementation of fulfillment module, enhancing operational efficiency and service delivery.
- Backend Development: Implemented features on SAP Hybris Commerce using Java and Spring Boot.
- Developed asynchronous, reactive microservices using Eclipse Vert.x in Java 15, with PostgreSQL for data storage.
Education
Contact
Best reach: caganbakirci@gmail.com · USC: cbakirci@usc.edu