Denizhan Kara

AI/ML Research Scientist

Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Biography

I am an AI/ML researcher working on robust foundation models for time-series and multimodal sensing. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Tarek Abdelzaher.

My research focuses on foundation models for time series and multimodal sequential data, making them more robust and data-efficient by translating domain knowledge into model architectures, objectives, and training regimes. I am especially interested in building models that generalize under label scarcity, sensor heterogeneity, and deployment shift.

Research & Industry Experience

Waymo - Software Engineer Intern, Driver Understanding ML (2025)
US Army Research Laboratory - Research Scientist Intern, Multimodal Foundation Models R&D (2024)
Prometeia - Machine Learning Engineer (2020-2022)
Turkish Aerospace - Software Design Engineer, Autopilot Systems (2017-2019)

Selected Publications

ICCCN '26
REMIX: Adaptive Open-Domain Signal Mixing for Efficient Sensing Data Augmentation
Denizhan Kara, T. Kimura, C. Hu, J. Li, Y. Chen, Y. Hu, H. Zhao, S. Liu, T. Abdelzaher
In Proc. 35th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), Honolulu, HI, July 2026.

[PDF] [arXiv] [Code]
NeurIPS '25
AdaTS: Learning Adaptive Time Series Representations via Dynamic Soft Contrasts
Denizhan Kara, T. Kimura, J. Li, B. He, Y. Chen, Y. Hu, H. Zhao, S. Liu, T. Abdelzaher

[PDF] [arXiv] [Code]
ICCCN '25
DiffPhys: Differential Physics Augmentations for Enhanced Representations
Denizhan Kara, T. Kimura, D. Sun, J. Li, Y. Chen, Y. Hu, H. Zhao, J. Bhattacharyya, T. Abdelzaher

[PDF] [arXiv] [Code]
SenSys '24
PhyMask: An Adaptive Masking Paradigm for Efficient Self-Supervised Learning in IoT
Denizhan Kara, T. Kimura, Y. Chen, J. Li, R. Wang, Y. Chen, L. Kaplan, J. Bhattacharyya, T. Abdelzaher

[PDF] [arXiv] [Code]
WWW '24
FreqMAE: Frequency-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multi-Modal IoT Sensing
Denizhan Kara, T. Kimura, S. Liu, J. Li, D. Liu, T. Wang, R. Wang, T. Abdelzaher

[PDF] [arXiv] [Code]
Under Review
OVERTON: A Misbehavior Detection and Trust Framework for Vehicular (V2X) Networks
Denizhan Kara, K. H. Kim, S. Mohan, M. Hasan, T. Shimizu, H. Lu
Under review at ACM CCS 2026

[PDF] [arXiv]

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