A message to prospective students
Dear prospective student,
Choosing a university program at a time when artificial intelligence is changing almost every profession is understandably difficult. You may be asking not only which university to choose, but also whether the profession itself will still exist when you graduate. We take that question seriously.
At Hacettepe AIDE, our goal is not to train you merely to operate today’s AI tools. Tools change quickly. We aim to help you understand the mathematics, algorithms, data, software systems, and engineering principles behind them; to evaluate their capabilities and limitations; and to design systems that are reliable, responsible, and useful.
Our department was established in 2026, but our experience did not begin this year. Since 2019, Hacettepe University has offered the first undergraduate program established under the name Artificial Intelligence Engineering at a public university in Türkiye. The new department builds on that experience and extends it through data engineering, scalable computing, and a broader view of the full lifecycle of intelligent systems.
You will join a research-active academic community. Our faculty publish at selective international conferences, lead research in machine learning, computer vision, multimodal AI, robotics, autonomous systems, data science, and related fields, and supervise laboratories where undergraduate students can participate in research. At the same time, our place within the Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences allows students to benefit from selected Computer Engineering courses and a broader computing environment.
We cannot promise that the technologies or job titles of the future will look exactly like those of today. We can promise an education designed around foundations that endure, practical experience, intellectual curiosity, and the ability to continue learning. We are looking for students who want not only to use AI, but to understand, question, improve, and build it.
I invite you to explore our curriculum, meet our faculty, examine our research, and ask difficult questions before making your decision.
Department Chair
Why Hacettepe AIDE?
A degree title alone does not define the quality of an educational experience. What matters is the academic community, the curriculum, the research environment, and the opportunities available to students.
A pioneering record
The department is new, but the educational experience behind it dates to Hacettepe’s Artificial Intelligence Engineering program, launched in 2019.
Research-active faculty
Students are taught and supervised by academics who contribute to selective international venues and participate directly in current AI research.
AI and data engineering together
The curriculum connects learning algorithms with the data pipelines, software systems, evaluation practices, and computing infrastructure required to make AI work in the real world.
Theory, laboratories, and projects
Mathematical and computational foundations are reinforced through coordinated laboratory courses, programming assignments, research-oriented work, internships, and a graduation project.
Research opportunities for undergraduates
Students can engage with faculty-led laboratories, funded projects, and research problems in computer vision, generative AI, robotics, autonomous systems, multimodal learning, and data-intensive applications.
Breadth within the same faculty
The program has its own identity while allowing students to benefit from selected Computer Engineering courses and the wider academic ecosystem of the Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences.
Links between academic research and industry
Hacettepe’s strategic collaborations, including the ASELSAN–Hacettepe University Artificial Intelligence Technologies Laboratory established under the ASELABS Program, support applied research and joint technology development, connecting academic knowledge with major engineering challenges.
Research strength that reaches the classroom
The strength of an academic program should also be visible in the research activity of the people who teach in it. The figure below ranks universities in Türkiye by their publication output at selective conferences in artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval, using CSRankings statistics from the preceding ten years.
What this indicates. Based on publication output at selected leading conferences in artificial intelligence and its major subfields over the preceding ten years, Hacettepe is the highest-performing university among those in Türkiye offering a dedicated undergraduate program in Artificial Intelligence Engineering or Artificial Intelligence and Data Engineering. All four Hacettepe faculty members identified in this CSRankings view are members of Hacettepe AIDE, indicating that the University’s most visible research output in these selected AI venues is concentrated within the department.
AIDE students also benefit from the broader academic environment of the Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences, including selected courses and expertise from the Department of Computer Engineering. What distinguishes AIDE is that artificial intelligence and data engineering are not secondary concentrations within a broader program; they form the central academic identity of the department, its curriculum, and its research environment.
CSRankings is not a general university ranking. It is a publication-based indicator that counts faculty papers at selected, high-impact research conferences and adjusts publication credit across co-authors. View the current CSRankings results →
What kind of environment will you enter?
- An academically focused community: a department where teaching and research are closely connected.
- Direct contact with active researchers: opportunities to learn from faculty working on current scientific problems.
- A demanding but supportive curriculum: strong foundations followed by laboratories, projects, and technical electives.
- Room to develop your own direction: pathways toward research, graduate study, entrepreneurship, or technical careers.
- A culture of responsible AI: attention to evaluation, reproducibility, privacy, fairness, safety, and societal impact.
Is this program right for you?
This program may be a strong fit if you enjoy mathematics and programming, are curious about how intelligent systems work, are willing to study both theory and implementation, and want to keep learning in a rapidly changing field. It is not a program built around using a small set of current tools; it is an engineering education for understanding, evaluating, and creating the technologies that come next.