Y. Sinan Hanay

Rustem Ozakar, Rafet Efe Gazanfer, Y. Sinan Hanay

In this work, we analyze the happiness levels of countries using an unbiased emotion detector, artificial intelligence (AI). To date, researchers proposed many factors that may affect happiness such as wealth, health and safety. Even though these factors all seem relevant, there is no clear consensus between sociologists on how to interpret these, and the models to estimate the cost of these utilities include some assumptions. Researchers in social sciences have been working on determination of the happiness levels in society and exploration of the factors correlated with it through polls and different statistical methods. In our work, by using artificial intelligence, we introduce a different and relatively unbiased approach to this problem. By using AI, we make no assumption about what makes a person happy, and leave the decision to AI to detect the emotions from the faces of people collected from publicly available street footages. We analyzed the happiness levels in eight different cities around the world through available footage on the Internet and found out that there is no statistically significant difference between countries in terms of happiness.

Mirbek Turduev, Çağrı Latifoğlu, İbrahim Halil Giden et al.

We present a novel approach based on machine learning for designing photonic structures. In particular, we focus on strong light confinement that allows the design of an efficient free-space-to-waveguide coupler which is made of Si- slab overlying on the top of silica substrate. The learning algorithm is implemented using bitwise square Si- cells and the whole optimized device has a footprint of $\boldsymbol{2 \, μm \times 1\, μm}$, which is the smallest size ever achieved numerically. To find the effect of Si- slab thickness on the sub-wavelength focusing and strong coupling characteristics of optimized photonic structure, we carried out three-dimensional time-domain numerical calculations. Corresponding optimum values of full width at half maximum and coupling efficiency were calculated as $\boldsymbol{0.158 λ}$ and $\boldsymbol{-1.87\,dB}$ with slab thickness of $\boldsymbol{280nm}$. Compared to the conventional counterparts, the optimized lens and coupler designs are easy-to-fabricate via optical lithography techniques, quite compact, and can operate at telecommunication wavelengths. The outcomes of the presented study show that machine learning can be beneficial for efficient photonic designs in various potential applications such as polarization-division, beam manipulation and optical interconnects.