Gunes was an undergraduate student at the
Yıldız Technical University. She moved to the
University of Technology Sydney for her doctoral research, where she was awarded the Australian Government International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) to focus on vision and machine learning based analysis of affective face and upper body behaviour. Her doctoral research showed that affective face and body displays are simultaneous but not strictly synchronous; explicit detection of temporal phases (onset-apex-offset) can improve the accuracy of affect recognition; recognition from fused face and body modalities performs better than that from the face or the body modality alone; and synchronized feature-level fusion achieves better performance than decision-level fusion. She created the Bimodal Face and Body Gesture Database (FABO), a collection of labelled videos of posed, affective face and body displays for automatic analysis of human nonverbal affective behavior. After earning her doctorate, she was appointed an
Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow, and worked on airport and railway security through object human tracking. In 2008, Gunes moved to
Imperial College London, where she worked alongside
Maja Pantić in the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group (iBUG). The project looked to build a dialogue system that can interact with humans
via a virtual character. == Research and career ==