Bariscan (Baris) Kurtkaya

I am a second-year PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I am advised by Prof. Nina Miolane as a member of the Geometric Intelligence Lab, supported by a PhD Fellowship from the UCSB ECE Department.

My research sits at the intersection of mechanistic interpretability, AI safety, and computational neuroscience. I investigate how neural networks use low-dimensional manifold geometry and attractor dynamics in latent space to implement core cognitive capabilities like memorization, generalization, and comparison, and how this geometric structure helps us interpret what a model "thinks" while performing a given "behavior". My work spans two levels: I build tools to understand the low-level computational building blocks behind memory and generalization, and I study how these mechanisms give rise to high-level emergent behaviors, including, most recently, how loyalty between AI agents can induce dishonesty in multi-agent systems.

Before UCSB, I completed my MSc in Computer Science and Engineering at Koç University as a KUIS AI Fellow, advised by Prof. Yücel Yemez, and worked as a visiting graduate researcher at Stanford University's Schnitzer Group, studying the geometry and dynamics of short-term memory in recurrent neural networks under Prof. Mark Schnitzer and Dr. Fatih Dinç. I also spent time at Virginia Tech's GemLab working with Prof. Pinar Yanardag on generative video models, and earlier did undergraduate research at Washington University in St. Louis's McDonnell Center. Throughout this journey I've had the chance to collaborate with researchers across Stanford, Harvard, UCSB, Virginia Tech, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Milan, and I feel fortunate to have worked alongside such thoughtful and generous people.

Beyond the lab, I'm an avid cyclist and I've recently gotten into triathlon, spending a lot of my free time on the road bike. I'm also a proud supporter of GCN (Global Cycling Network). I have a competitive athletic background too: I played volleyball at a semi-professional level in Turkey, and before that worked as a pacer for a running club in Istanbul.