Dr. Ekenel is a full professor at Istanbul Technical University Department of Computer Engineering, where he leads the Smart Interaction and Machine Intelligence (SiMiT) Lab. His research focus is on artificial intelligence, specifically, on computer vision and pattern recognition. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, which have received over 7000 citations (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LfIDj68AAAAJ). One of the application domains he is interested in is archaeology. He is especially interested in exploring large multimodal models for archeology.