What Ph.D. student Seyma Simsek values most about being part of the Sanghani Center is its collaborative and supportive research environment. 

“As students, we are encouraged to work across domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, and data analytics,” she said. “And the center provides opportunities to engage with impactful projects, industry-relevant problems, and interdisciplinary teams.”

Simsek’s research focuses on computer vision and natural language processing with an emphasis on multimodal learning and vision-language models.

She is particularly interested in developing artificial intelligence methods for multimodal reasoning and retrieval, leveraging large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and graph neural networks (GNNs) to extract and align structured information across images, text, video, and audio.

A real-world example of her work includes designing systems that can integrate visual data like camera feeds with textual or contextual information to enable more intelligent decision-making, such as multimodal traffic analysis or understanding an event, without relying on additional sensors.

“My interest in this area has grown from a desire to move beyond single-modal AI systems and explore how humans naturally reason across multiple sources of information,” said Simsek, who is advised by Chang-Tien Lu.

“Through my academic and research experience, I have become increasingly interested in how combining vision, language, and structured representations can lead to more robust and explainable AI systems,” she said.

She presented her co-authored paper, “Evaluating Edge-Based YOLOv5–ByteTrack Frameworks for Real-Time Traffic Signal Control,” at the IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data 2025).

Simsek holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from TED University and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Middle East Technical University, both located in Ankara, Turkey.

She is projected to graduate from Virginia Tech in Spring 2029.

Her goal after graduation is “to be a dedicated academic and contribute to the advancement of knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”