Ozel Yilmazel

(Oh-zelle)

PhD Student @ CIIR · UMass Amherst

he/him/his

ozel@yilmazel.com Download Resume

Merhaba, I'm a Computer Science PhD student at CIIR UMass Amherst, advised by Hamed Zamani and James Allan. Before PhD, I earned my M.S. from UMass Amherst as a Bay State Fellow. My work focuses on optimizing retrieval models for AI-agent consumption, addressing how agents ingest data differently and are sensitive to noise while existing search interfaces and interactions remain un-optimized for agentic use.

I am searching for research internship opportunities for Summer 2027. If your team is working on agentic information retrieval, designing retrieval systems, or agent evaluation, I would love to talk to you about my research. You can see a sample of the things I have worked on and currently working on in Projects tab.

My favorite quote and philosophy: "I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human and that's my greatest strength." - Superman (2025)

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News

  • October 2026 "SAFE-SEARCH: Safety, Accountability, Faithfulness, and Evaluation in Conversational Search" workshop is accepted to ECIR 2027! Very excited to be part of the organizing team and looking forward to papers.
  • August 2026 "Does Retrieval Augmented Generation Collapse When It Retrieves AI-Generated Documents?" is accepted to GroundLM EMNLP 2026!
  • April 2026 "Personalized Question Answering via a Dual Retrieval Augmentation Approach" is accepted to SIGIR 2026! See you in Melbourne!
  • Feb 2026 Papers submitted! Admitted to UMass Amherst for PhD!
  • Dec 2025 Our Spotify Natural Querying project scored second place by popularity vote in our information retrieval class.
  • Oct 2025 Started working with MassAITC on developing an AI facilitator bot for caregiver support groups.
  • May 2025 Graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in Computer Science from UMass Amherst, earning Dean's List honors and a Chancellor's Award.
  • Apr 2025 Started as a Graduate Student Researcher at UMass Amherst's CIIR, focusing on asymmetric personalization in language models.
  • Sep 2024 Transitioned to a part-time Machine Learning Engineer role at the UMass Center for Data Science, continuing work on the iNatAtor annotation platform and GeoModel improvements.
  • Aug 2024 Completed a summer internship as a Data Science Intern with DS4CG, developing iNatAtor and contributing to the SINR research project.
  • Jul 2023 Started a summer internship as a software developer and machine learning engineer at an early-stage start-up.