Rate My Professor Çiçek Güven

Çiçek Güven is an Associate Professor in the Department of Intelligent Systems within Tilburg University's Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. She obtained her PhD in Mathematics from Eindhoven University of Technology in 2011, with a dissertation entitled "Buildings and Kneser Graphs," after completing her Master's degree in Mathematics in 2007 and Bachelor's degree in 2005, both from Koç University. Her academic journey includes a postdoctoral position in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology from 2016 to 2018. Prior to returning to academia, she gained industry experience as a Quantitative Analyst at the Royal Bank of Scotland from 2011 to 2012 and as a Data Analyst at Seabury Group (now Accenture) from 2013 to 2016. Since 2019, she has been at Tilburg University, initially as an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence department, before her promotion to Associate Professor in 2025.

Güven's research focuses on network analysis and machine learning techniques applied to graph-structured data. She investigates how networks emerge, their characterization, evolution, and the identification of meaningful substructures, with an emphasis on explainability in linking structural properties to prediction outcomes. Her work spans applications such as brain networks, population networks, and electrical grids. Committed to data science projects with social impact, she contributes to initiatives like the ILUSTRE Lab consortium for sustainable water management and energy transition in Curaçao, the Child Growth Monitor by the Zero Hunger Lab for detecting malnutrition in children using AI, and the ICON project of the Zero Poverty Lab exploring connections between brain networks and poverty. Key publications include "Harnessing firm similarities with graph neural networks for superior stock predictions" (2025, co-authored with Tein Baaijens and Gonzalo Nápoles), "ARAN: Age-Restricted Anonymized Dataset of Children Images and Body Measurements" (2025, Journal of Imaging), "A closer look at the pairwise similarity based graphs and ways to capture relationships beyond pairs" (2025), and "Explaining CNN-based body measurement estimation in children using grad-RAM" (2026). She also co-created the ARAN dataset and has presented on AI applications for power load and renewable energy forecasting.