Emir Kisa

About Me

I am a Visiting Researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. James M. Rehg and mentored by Ozgur Kara.

I am interested in controllability and safety of diffusion and flow models. My recent work on controllability, SEGUE, generates transitions between video clips from a single visual reference. In the future, I hope to expand my work into toward real-time, interactive video generation.

Before that, I was the founding AI engineer at SOLACE, a startup building voice assistants and AI avatars. Earlier, I spent two years working in ML Engineering roles accross industry and startups.

I studied Electrical & Electronics Engineering at Bogazici University. Also, I spend a great deal of time interacting with math, philosophy, and music.

I am applying to PhD programs for Fall 2027. If my profile seems like a good fit for your group, please feel free to reach out!
Emir Kisa

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Urbana, IL · Istanbul

News

Experience

Visiting Researcher, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Advised by Prof. James M. Rehg. First-author work on SEGUE, one-shot transition effect generation: a single LoRA on a frozen video diffusion model that reads the effect from a reference clip alone, using visual reference isolation in training and null-reference guidance at inference. Built the SEGUE-Benchmark dataset of 1,692 transition classes. With Ozgur Kara, Victor Escorcia, Junho Kim, and Alexander Schwing.
Jan 2026 – Present
Founding AI Engineer, SOLACE, Istanbul
Full AI stack: low-latency avatar generation, a custom wake word engine, agentic voice assistants over WebRTC/WebSocket. Helped raise $250K pre-seed.
Nov 2024 – Jan 2026
Undergraduate Researcher, Bogazici University (with Prof. Birkan Yilmaz)
3D terrain generation combining VGG19-based morphology transfer with procedural priors; controllable topology synthesis without training a generator.
Sep 2024 – Jan 2025
AI Engineer, HiRize AI, United States (remote)
Document intelligence pipelines with transformers, OCR, and custom entity extraction, deployed for enterprise document workflows.
Nov 2023 – Jun 2024
Research Intern, Turkish Aerospace, Ankara
Post-earthquake UAV small-object detection. Extended YOLOv5 with cross-attention and a P2 feature map: mAP 70% → 78%.
Aug – Sep 2023
ML & Data Science, Turkish Airlines Technology, Istanbul
Fraud detection models deployed into production workflows.
Jan – Aug 2023
Undergraduate Researcher, DeepMIA Lab, Bogazici University
CNNs, custom losses, segmentation architectures, and VAE/diffusion experiments from scratch. With Dr. Mehmet Turan and Dr. Yasin Almalioglu (Oxford).
Sep 2022 – Apr 2023
Research Intern, ITU Aerospace Research Center, Istanbul
Jul – Aug 2022

Research

SEGUE: Visual Signal as Exclusive Guidance for One-Shot Transition Effect Generation
Emir Kisa, Victor Escorcia, Junho Kim, Alexander Schwing, Ozgur Kara†, James M. Rehg† († joint last authors)
Under review
project page / paper

Show SEGUE a transition effect in one reference clip, and it generates that effect between any two video clips, reading the effect only from the video, with no text description of it.

Education

B.S., Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul
Oct 2021 – Jan 2025
B.S., Mechanical Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul
Transferred to Electrical and Electronics Engineering.
Oct 2019 – May 2021

Honors

Projects

Semantic Segmentation from Scratch · 2022–23
Segmentation models for an autonomous driving agent on the CARLA Leaderboard; architectures evaluated in closed-loop driving.
YOLOv5 + Cross-Attention · 2023
Cross-attention layers and a P2 feature map for UAV small-object detection; +8% mAP.
Ensi / EMA (SOLACE) · 2024–25
Real-time voice AI: a smart home assistant and an interactive shopping agent.
Tercihify · 2024
AI university preference tool built on official program data.
Gotcha · 2023
AI video interviewer with CEFR-aligned scoring and semantic resume matching.

On the Shelf