CV

Selected academic CV. For publications, teaching, and supervision, see the corresponding pages.

Contact Information

Name Semih Cayci
Professional Title Junior Professor for Mathematics of Machine Learning
Email cayci@mathc.rwth-aachen.de
Website https://semihcayci.github.io

Experience

  • 2022 - Present

    Aachen, Germany

    Tenure-Track Junior Professor (W1) for Mathematics of Machine Learning
    RWTH Aachen University
    Department of Mathematics. Positive interim evaluation in 2025.
  • 2020 - 2022

    Urbana, IL, USA

    NSF TRIPODS Postdoctoral Fellow
    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Coordinated Science Laboratory; Illinois Institute for Data Science and Dynamical Systems (IDS2).
    • Hosts: Rayadurgam Srikant (UIUC) and Niao He (ETH Zurich).
  • 2017 - 2017

    Cambridge, MA, USA

    Intern Scientist
    Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)
    Host: Toshiaki Koike-Akino.

Education

  • 2014 - 2020

    Columbus, OH, USA

    PhD
    The Ohio State University
    Electrical and Computer Engineering
    • Dissertation: Online Learning for Optimal Control of Communication and Computing Systems.
    • Advisor: Atilla Eryilmaz.
  • 2010 - 2013

    Ankara, Turkey

    MSc
    Bilkent University
    Electrical and Electronics Engineering
    • Thesis: Lossless Data Compression with Polar Codes.
    • Advisors: Erdal Arıkan and Orhan Arıkan.
  • 2005 - 2010

    Istanbul, Turkey

    BSc
    Bogazici University
    Electrical and Electronics Engineering

Research interests

  • Mathematical foundations of artificial intelligence: deep learning and reinforcement learning, optimization theory, and applied stochastic analysis.

Grants

2026–2027: NVIDIA Academic Grant: GPU-Accelerated Benchmarking of Learning-Based Routing under Heavy Tails. PI: Semih Cayci. Two NVIDIA DGX Spark systems.
2024–2025: ERS, RWTH Aachen: Mathematical and Practical Properties of Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning (OPSF854). Co-PIs: Semih Cayci and Sebastian Trimpe.

Professional service

Organization: Publicity chair, ACM SIGMETRICS 2026 and 2027; publicity co-chair, IEEE WiOpt 2026.
Program committees: IEEE INFOCOM 2027; AAAI 2026 and 2027; ACM MobiHoc 2025; COLT 2022; IEEE WiOpt 2021.
University service: Hiring committees for W2 Professorships in Mathematical Optimization and Industrial Mathematics, RWTH Aachen University.
Reviewing: JMLR; SIAM journals on Control and Optimization and Mathematics of Data Science; Mathematics of Operations Research; ICML; NeurIPS; AISTATS; ICLR; COLT, among others.

Memberships

  • ELLIS and ELLIS NRW; RWTH Center for Artificial Intelligence; SFB 1481: Sparsity and Singular Structures; EDDy Research and Teaching Group.

Selected awards and fellowships

2026: NVIDIA Academic Grant.
2020: NSF TRIPODS Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
2016: Dr. Burn Lin Travel Grant Award, The Ohio State University.
2010–2014: Bilkent University Graduate School Scholarship.
2005–2010: Turkish Ministry of Education Merit Scholarship.

Selected invited lectures

June 2026: Policy Gradient Methods. Reinforcement Learning Summer School, Milan.
March 2024: Towards Robust and Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Using Policy Optimization. Airbus Operations, Hamburg.
May 2023: Theoretical Aspects of Deep Learning. SFB 1481 Spring School, Kloster Steinfeld.