Ruya Karagulle awarded Predoctoral Fellowship to support research on human-centered autonomous systems

Ruya Karagulle, Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Scientific Computing, was awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship to support her research focused on formal methods and learning for interactions between autonomous systems and humans. Her priority is human-centered approaches to autonomous systems, while ensuring their safety.

Her proposed dissertation title is “Integrating Formal Methods and Human Feedback for Safe and Personalized Control Synthesis.”

“The first step in my research was to understand human behaviors in safety-critical systems, particularly in driving,” explains Karagulle. “I then shifted my focus to designing autonomous systems that are not only safe in mathematically provable ways but also user-friendly. My primary goal is to encourage the wider adoption of these algorithms and, consequently, reduce accidents due to human error. Also, by enabling personalization within safe operation, I aim to promote equity for all.”

“My future research will explore how inherent properties of temporal logic can be leveraged to improve the efficiency of the learning process.”

An important aspect of her work has been to collect human feedback and incorporate it into decision making mechanisms of autonomous systems where safety with respect to logical rules can be guaranteed. During this process, she developed an active learning algorithm and incorporated it into the questionnaire which resulted in dramatically reducing the length of the questionnaire, without sacrificing performance. This innovation has resulted in one U.S. patent application, in collaboration with Toyota Research Institute.

Last year, she was invited to participate in one of the Dagstuhl Seminars, called “Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods Join Forces for Reliable Autonomy.” Based on that experience, she is now collaborating with a professor at Lehigh University on a topic related to her dissertation.

She organized a special Girls in Control Workshop at the 2021 Int. Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and was named Cyber-Physical Human Systems (CPHS) Fellow at IFAC 2024. This provided her with the opportunity to mentor with experts in the field. In addition, she was a presenter and role-model expert at Career Girls 2023, and has served as a reviewer for several professional conferences. 

Karagulle received her bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and minor in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University in Istanbul. Her joint degree will be from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery & Engineering (MICDE). She is advised by Necmiye Ozay, Chen-Luan Family Faculty Development Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship supports students who are working on dissertations that are “unusually creative, ambitious, and impactful,” and who expect to complete their dissertations during their 3-term fellowship period. Students receive a stipend of more than $40K, tuition, fees, and insurance.