Biography

Ömer Şahin Taş completed his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with High Honors at Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in 2011, specializing in robotics and control. He simultaneously earned an extracurricular minor in electrical engineering through a merit-based program. During his undergraduate studies, he built Turkey's first Formula SAE race car for the FSAE Michigan 2010 race and contributed to Turkey's first intervehicular communication-based autonomous car, which participated in the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge held in the Netherlands.

After receiving a prestigious TEV/DAAD scholarship, he pursued his master's degree at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), specializing in mechatronics and information technology, graduating with "sehr gut" (very good) in 2014. He wrote his master's thesis on motion planning for autonomous vehicles at FZI Research Center for Information Technology and subsequently joined the institute as a research scientist.

He earned his Ph.D. in Robotics from KIT in 2022 with summa cum laude, the highest distinction possible. His dissertation on motion planning under partial observability, jointly supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christoph Stiller (KIT) and Prof. Dr. Mykel Kochenderfer (Stanford University), won the UniDAS Science Award for the best autonomous driving thesis in Germany and was a finalist for the IEEE ITS Society Best Dissertation Award. Following his doctorate, he expanded his research as a visiting researcher at the University of Toronto, hosted by Prof. Dr. Igor Gilitschenski.

Since July 2017, he has served as the manager of the Mobile Perception Systems department at FZI Research Center for Information Technology while continuing his role as a research group leader at KIT. He leads a team of 11 Ph.D. researchers and facilitates the transfer of research results to industry through technology transfer projects. His research contributions have garnered 905 citations with an h-index of 13, with publications at leading venues including ICLR, ICML, TMLR, and CoRL.

For more information, you can visit his profiles on KIT and FZI webpages.

Education

  • Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 2022
    • Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.)
    • Completed with 'mit Auszeichnung' (summa cum laude)
  • Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 2014
    • M.Sc. in mechanical engineering
    • Completed with 'sehr gut' (very good)
    • DAAD Scholarship during master's
  • Istanbul Technical University, 2011
    • B.Sc. in mechanical engineering (High Honors)
    • Minor in electrical engineering (Honors)

Awards

  • 2025 - Honorable Mention in the Waymo Interaction Prediction Challenge at CVPR
  • 2023 - UniDAS Science Award (“Wissenschaftspreis”)
  • 2023 - ITS Society Best Dissertation Award Finalist
  • 2022 - 2nd place “Best Paper Award” at IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference
  • 2016 - 2nd place as a team in the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge 2016