I am a PhD student and Research Associate at the Department of Aerospace Engineering of Bundeswehr University Munich, under the supervision of Michael Schmitt. Before, I was a research assistant at Koç University, on an ERC project titled UrbanOccupations. I received my Master’s degree in Satellite Communication and Remote Sensing from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey in 2021 under the supervision of Elif Sertel.
My research interests focus especially, but not exclusively, on machine/deep learning and computer vision with a particular emphasis on multi-modal earth observation data for environmental conservation using explainable machine learning.
News
[March, 2024] I will join Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab as a Research Intern under the Residency Program.
[March, 2024] Our paper titled “Mapping Land Naturalness from Sentinel-2 using Deep Contextual and Geographical Priors” has been accepted to ICLR 2024 Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop.
[June, 2023] I participated in a tutorial on Ethics in AI for Earth Observation at the International Conference on Geosciences and Remote Sensing, where I presented the ethical challenges and considerations of conducting geospatial machine learning research with a focus on using satellite data for environmental monitoring and biodiversity conservation. See the LinkedIn post here.
[March, 2023] Our paper titled Explaining Multi Modal Data Fusion: Occlusion Analysis for Wilderness Mapping has been accepted to ICLR 2023 Machine Learning for Remote Sensing Workshop. I further received a travel grant to visit the conference.
[October, 2022] I visited Ribana Roscher’s Remote Sensing Group @ Bonn University.
[October, 2022] I took over a demo station at the GeoforGood2022 Summit organized by Google. I talked about our Naturalness Index and how it complements our main project on wilderness mapping see the LinkedIn post here.
[August, 2022] I have presented our study “Towards an automatic, satellite-based mapping of wilderness areas” at ForestST2022 in Berlin.
[June, 2022] I have presented our work “MapInWild: A Dataset for Global Wilderness Mapping” at IGARSS 2022. See my related LinkedIn post here.
[January, 2022] [2021 Best M.Sc. Thesis Award]: My master’s thesis titled “Land Cover and Land Use Classification of Multi-Modal High-Resolution Satellite Images Using Multi-Task Deep Learning Approach” received the first prize in IEEE GRSS Turkey Master Thesis Competition. See my talk here and announcement here(in Turkish).
[July, 2021] I have presented our work titled “A Multi-task Deep Learning Framework for Building Footprint Segmentation” at IGARSS 2021.
[July, 2021] I am selected to attend the Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School this year.
[October, 2020] The SPOT-7 and TerraSAR-X images used in my thesis are delivered by AIRBUS and German Aerospace Center(DLR) after positive evaluation of scientific proposals, respectively.
[July, 2020] My MSc thesis has been awarded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, 2210/C Scholarship Program in the Priority Fields in Science and Technology. Feel free to take a look at the relevant posts covering my thesis and more here.
Publications
10- Tobias Landmann, Michael Schmitt, Burak Ekim, Jandouwe Villinger, Faith Ashiono, Jan C. Habel & Henri E. Z. Tonnang. 2023. Insect diversity is a good indicator of biodiversity status in Africa. Communications Earth & Environment Paper.
9-Burak Ekim, Michael Schmitt. 2023. “Explaining Multimodal Data Fusion: Occlusion Analysis for Wilderness Mapping”. Oral presentation at ICLR 2023 Machine Learning for Remote Sensing Workshop. Preprint.
8-Burak Ekim, Michael Schmitt. 2023. “Explaining Multimodal Data Fusion: Occlusion Analysis for Wilderness Mapping” IGARSS 2023.
7-Burak Ekim, Timo T. Stomberg, Ribana Roscher, Michael Schmitt. 2022. “Mapinwild: A Remote Sensing Dataset to Address the Question What Makes Nature Wild. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine Paper, Code, Dataset.
6-Burak Ekim, Michael Schmitt. 2022. “MapInWild: A Dataset for Global Wilderness Mapping” IGARSS 2022. Paper, Code, Dataset.
5- Elif Sertel, Burak Ekim, Paria Ettehadi Osgouei, and M. Erdem Kabadayi. 2022. “Land Use and Land Cover Mapping Using Deep Learning Based Segmentation Approaches and VHR Worldview-3 Images” Remote Sensing 14, no. 18: 4558. Paper, Code and Dataset.
4- Burak Ekim, Zeyu Dong, Dmitry Rashkovetsky, Michael Schmitt. “The naturalness index for the identification of natural areas on regional scale”, 2021, International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation: Paper.
3- Burak Ekim, Elif Sertel. “Deep neural network ensembles for remote sensing land cover and land use classification”, 2021, International Journal of Digital Earth: Paper.
2- Burak Ekim, Elif Sertel. “A Multi-Task Deep Learning Framework for Building Footprint Segmentation”, IGARSS 2021, Brussels: Paper and Code.
1- Burak Ekim, Elif Sertel, M. Erdem Kabadayı. “Automatic Road Extraction from Historical Maps using Deep Learning Techniques: A Regional Case Study of Turkey in a German World War II Map”, 2021, ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf: Paper, Code, Dataset and Weights.