Shahin Atakishiyev
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Computing Science
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Deep Learning Researcher, Huawei Technologies Canada
Office: Computing Science Centre 2-05, University of Alberta

Shahin Atakishiyev is from the Mirzabayli village of Gabala, Azerbaijan. He received a PhD in Computing Science in September 2024 and an MSc in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems in January 2018 from the University of Alberta, Canada. He obtained a BSc in Computer Engineering from Qafqaz University, Azerbaijan, in June 2015. During doctoral study, Shahin developed explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches for autonomous vehicles under the supervision of Prof. Randy Goebel and was a member of the XAI lab. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta working with Prof. Randy Goebel, and is also a Deep Learning Researcher at Huawei Technologies Canada in Edmonton.

Email  |  CV  |  PhD Thesis  |  Google Scholar  

  News
  • Nov 2024: Gave an interview to Consensium on the potential of XAI in improving road safety. Article
  • Oct 2024: Joined Huawei Technologies Canada as a Deep Learning Researcher.
  • Oct 2024: Started Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta with Prof. Randy Goebel.
  • Sep 2024: Gave a talk at the Smart Mobility Workshop of the IEEE ITSC-2024 Conference, as an Invited Speaker, in Edmonton, Canada.
  • Sep 2024: Gave a lecture on the future of autonomous driving as an Invited Speaker in CMPUT 495 - Honors Seminar, a class of nearly 200 students, at the University of Alberta.
  • ***Sep 2024:*** Defended my PhD thesis and was nominated for the Outstanding PhD Thesis Award by the Examining Committee.
  • Aug 2024: Gave a seminar on an Autonomous Vehicle 2.0 (AV 2.0), a new approach to autonomous driving, and safety and explainability challengences with AV 2.0. [Talk]
  • Jul 2024: Our paper on comprehensive overview of and field guide on explainable AI approaches for autonomous driving was published in the IEEE Access journal. [Paper]
  • Mar 2024: Our paper on situation awareness framework for autonomous driving was accepted to the IEEE IV-2024 Conference in Jeju, South Korea. [Paper]
  • Mar 2024: New paper (a preprint) on safety implications of explainable AI in end-to-end autonomous driving is available. [Paper]
  • Jan 2024: Gave a seminar on our situation awareness framework for autonomous driving to the Interactive Robotics Group of the CSAIL lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • Jan 2024: Awarded the Graduate Student Travel Award for academic travel to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States.
  • Nov 2023: Awarded the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship (AGES) for outstanding academic achievements in doctoral study.
  • Aug 2023: Passed the PhD Candidacy Exam.
  • Jul 2023: Our paper on explaining autonomous driving actions with visual question answering (VQA) was accepted to the IEEE ITSC-2023 Conference in Bilbao, Spain. [Paper] [Code]
Research Interests
In general, research interests focus on developing safe, ethical, human-centered, and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches to real-world problems. Current research is centered on applying XAI and Vision-Language Foundation Models to autonomous vehicles and various downstream vision and natural language processing tasks.

Papers

 [7] Shahin Atakishiyev, Mohammad Salameh, Randy Goebel. Safety Implications of Explainable Artificial Intelligence in End-to-End Autonomous Driving. Under review. [PDF]

[6] Shahin Atakishiyev, Mohammad Salameh, Hengshuai Yao, Randy Goebel. Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Overview and Field Guide for Future Research Directions. IEEE Access, Vol. 12, pp. 101603-101625, 2024. [PDF]

[5] Shahin Atakishiyev, Mohammad Salameh, Randy Goebel. Incorporating Explanations into Human-Machine Interfaces for Trust and Situation Awareness in Autonomous Vehicles. In Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE 35th Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, Jeju, South Korea, pp. 2948-2955, 2024. [PDF]

[4] Shahin Atakishiyev, Mohammad Salameh, Housam Babiker, Randy Goebel. Explaining Autonomous Driving Actions with Visual Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE 26th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Bilbao, Spain, pp. 1207-1214, 2023. [PDF]

[3] Shahin Atakishiyev, Mohammad Salameh, Hengshuai Yao, Randy Goebel. Towards Safe, Explainable, and Regulated Autonomous Driving. In Explainable AI for Intelligent Transportation Systems, pp. 32-52, 2023. [PDF]

[2] Mi-Young Kim, Shahin Atakishiyev, Housam Babiker, Nawshad Farruque, Randy Goebel, Osmar R. Zaïane, Mohammad-Hossein Motallebi, Juliano Rabelo, Talat Syed, Hengshuai Yao, Peter Chun. A Multi-Component Framework for the Analysis and Design of Explainable Artificial Intelligence. Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction , 3(4), pp. 900-921, 2021. [PDF]

[1] Shahin Atakishiyev and Marek Reformat. Analysis of Word Embeddings Using Fuzzy Clustering. Recent Developments and the New Direction in Soft-Computing Foundations and Applications, pp. 539-551, 2021. [PDF]
Teaching
Fall 2022: Instructor for NLP 3101: Natural Language Processing, a graduate level course at the Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University. Taught the course online and remotely from Edmonton, Canada.
Winter 2022: CMPUT 175: Introduction to the Foundations of Computation II (Prof. Osmar Zaïane and Sadaf Ahmed's Teaching Assistant (TA), University of Alberta)

Fall 2019: CMPUT 463/563: Probabilistic Graphical Models (Prof. Russell Greiner's TA, University of Alberta)
  Selected Awards
  • Sep 2024: A nominee for the Outstanding PhD Thesis Award at the University of Alberta
  • Jan 2024: Graduate Student Travel Award (a one-time payment award) for
    academic travel to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  • Nov 2023: Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship (a one-time payment award)
  • Feb 2022: AAAI-2022 Conference Scholarship (a one-time payment award)
  • May 2020: Doctoral Scholarship by the Ministry of Science and Education of the
    Republic of Azerbaijan (May 2020 - Aug 2024)
  • Mar 2019: Doctoral Funding by the Department of Computing Science of the
    University of Alberta (Sep 2019 - Aug 2024)
  • Sep 2015: Master’s Scholarship by the Ministry of Science and Education of the
    Republic of Azerbaijan (Jan 2016 - Jan 2018)

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