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Experience | Koç University | 2002..current | |||||||||||||
Professor of Computer Engineering at Koç University College of Engineering. Served as the director of the Computer Information Technology Department during 2009-2011, 2013. Served as the founding director of the Koç University İş Bank Artificial Intelligence (KUIS AI) Center (2020-2022). The KUIS AI center is the leading AI research center in the region with 15 AI faculty, 30+ affiliated faculty, and 100+ graduate students, postdocs and researchers, 20+ active sponsored projects. | |||||||||||||||
InQuira, Inc. | 2000-2002 | ||||||||||||||
Co-founded InQuira - a company that leverages my patented natural language processing technology to provide human interaction solutions for large enterprises. Served as Chief Scientist and VP of Research and Development. InQuira was acquired by Oracle in 2011. | |||||||||||||||
Ascent Technology, Inc. | 1999 | ||||||||||||||
Worked as a Development Scientist at Ascent - A company founded by Patrick Winston and other members of the MIT AI Lab to apply the results of advanced research to the solution of complex resource planning, scheduling, allocation, and situation-assessment problems. Developed Java applications for airport resource planning incorporating Queuing Theory. | |||||||||||||||
Education |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science |
1988-1999 | |||||||||||||
Postdoctoral Research Associate |
1999 | ||||||||||||||
Worked with Boris Katz and the Infolab Group on the development of the START question answering system. | |||||||||||||||
Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science |
1998 | ||||||||||||||
PhD dissertation: Discovery of Linguistic Relations Using Lexical Attraction. Advisors: Patrick Winston, Marvin Minsky, and Boris Katz. Minor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Area exam concentration on the Cyc knowledge based system. | |||||||||||||||
Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science |
1994 | ||||||||||||||
Master's thesis on genetic algorithms and optimization. Developed the numerical optimization algorithm Dynamic Hill Climbing . | |||||||||||||||
Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering |
1992 | ||||||||||||||
Bachelor's thesis on genetic algorithms. Research projects in computer vision, digital design and artificial intelligence. Minor in Economics . Worked as an undergraduate research assistant at the AI Lab on genetic algorithms, mobile robotics and machine vision. | |||||||||||||||
Research | Natural Language Processing | ||||||||||||||
Current work focused on grounded language acquisition and understanding using deep learning
models supported by one Tubitak and one EU project. Previous work includes supervised and
unsupervised approaches to syntax, morphology, lexical semantics, language acquisition and
machine translation. Developed the Lexical Attraction
Theory of linguistic knowledge for my dissertation. The theory attempts to
explain how an agent without prior linguistic knowledge can learn to identify linguistic
relations using information theoretic measures in example sentences. My program was able to
achieve the best unsupervised language learning results at the time of its publication.
Worked on the START
question answering system developed
by Boris Katz. Developed
Omnibase, an information extraction system that can respond to database queries using
arbitrary knowledge sources on the Web. Created the question answering technology that was
successfully commercialized by Inquira, Inc. Member of the editorial board of the
Computational Linguistics Journal (2009-2011) and co-organized the SemEval series of
workshops (2010-2012). Selected publications:
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Other Research | |||||||||||||||
Machine Learning: Developed
Knet.jl, Koç University deep learning
framework. Studied efficient implementations of neural network operators and models on GPU
architectures. Numerical Optimization: Studied Genetic Algorithms with Patrick Winston analyzing population diversity and the problem of local optima. The result was the numerical optimization algorithm Dynamic Hill Climbing, which has found practical applications ranging from medical imaging to neural network training, satellite positioning, molecular energy minimization and regression in econometric models. Machine Vision: Worked in the machine vision group of Berthold Horn as an undergraduate research assistant developing image processing utilities. Had a short term position in the University of Hawaii to develop X windows utilities for vision research with Shahriar Negahdaripour. Studied applications of 3-D convolutional networks in computer vision. Computational Biology: Used machine learning methods to investigate protein dynamics, interactions and dynamics of biological networks. Computational Economics and Finance: Founded Redfire Capital Management Group with Michael de la Maza in 1995 with the purpose of developing agent-based computational models in economics and finance based on artificial intelligence techniques. The company currently has an active research contract in computational economics. Organized two workshops in 1998: Artificial Life VI Workshop on Agent-based Economics and the First Workshop on Agent-based Modeling of Financial Markets. Mobile Robotics: Worked in the mobile robot group of Rodney Brooks designing the TV circuitry for the robot Attila. Attila was a precursor of Sojourner, the robot NASA sent to Mars in 1997. Computer Chess: Worked with David McAllester developing the ABC-Search chess algorithm. The world champion chess program Socrates used some of our techniques successfully. Selected publications: | |||||||||||||||
Patents |
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Projects | CHIST-ERA (215E201) | 2016-2018 | |||||||||||||
Partner in the Chist-Era Project: "Relational symbol grounding using affordance learning". | |||||||||||||||
Tubitak 1001 (114E628) | 2016-2018 | ||||||||||||||
Researcher in the Tubitak Project: "Learning navigational language from linguistic and visual cues". | |||||||||||||||
Tubitak 1001 (113F092) | 2013-2015 | ||||||||||||||
Researcher in the Tubitak Project: "A new method for determining critical regions of allosteric proteins based on dynamical analysis of mode coupling". | |||||||||||||||
Tubitak 1001 (112E277) | 2013-2015 | ||||||||||||||
Principle Investigator in the Tubitak Project: "Natural Language Processing Applications of Unsupervised Word Categorization". | |||||||||||||||
ICT-PSP (270915) | 2011-2013 | ||||||||||||||
Partner in the European Commision ICT Policy Support Programme Project: "Bologna Translation Service". | |||||||||||||||
Tubitak 1507 (7110376) | 2011-2012 | ||||||||||||||
Researcher in the Tubitak Project: "Semantic Analysis and Orthographic Normalization in Turkish Legal Informatics". | |||||||||||||||
Tubitak 1001 (108E228) | 2009-2012 | ||||||||||||||
Principal Investigator in the Tubitak Project: "Word Sense Disambiguation and Semantic Relation Identification Using Statistical Language Models in Natural Language Processing". | |||||||||||||||
Tubitak 1002 (108E257) | 2009-2010 | ||||||||||||||
Principal Investigator in the Tubitak Project: "The Regression Model for Machine Translation". | |||||||||||||||
Tubitak 1507 (7080848) | 2008-2009 | ||||||||||||||
Researcher in the Tubitak Project: "Turkish Legal Informatics and Online Legal Search Engine" | |||||||||||||||
Tubitak 1001 (106T553) | 2007-2010 | ||||||||||||||
Researcher in the Tubitak Project: "Modelling of the Transcriptional Regulatory Network of the Yeast (Saccharomyces Cerevisiae) and Investigation of its Dynamics". | |||||||||||||||
Editorial | Computational Linguistics Journal, member of the editorial board. | 2009-2011 | |||||||||||||
SemEval3 Semantic Evaluation Exercise, co-organizer. | 2010-2012 | ||||||||||||||
ACL Semantics Area, co-chair. | 2011 | ||||||||||||||
Semeval-2010 task 12: Parser evaluation using textual entailments, organizer. | 2010 | ||||||||||||||
The CoNLL 2007 shared task on dependency parsing, co-organizer. | 2007 | ||||||||||||||
Semeval-2007 task 04: Classification of semantic relations between nominals, co-organizer. | 2007 | ||||||||||||||
Memberships | KUIS AI Center, Founding Director. | 2020- | |||||||||||||
Turkish Artificial Intelligence Initiative (TRAI), Academic Advisory Board member. | 2021- | ||||||||||||||
Turkish Data Depository Project (tdd.ai), Coordinator. | 2020- | ||||||||||||||
Turkey's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AITR), Board of Advisors member. | 2021- | ||||||||||||||
Turkey Open Source Platform, founding member. | 2020- | ||||||||||||||
United Nations Development Prog. (UNDP) SDG AI Lab, Advisory Board member. | 2020- | ||||||||||||||
İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Law, Advisory Board member. | 2021- | ||||||||||||||
Turkey Artificial Intelligence Consortium, member. | 2021- | ||||||||||||||
Teaching | Comp200 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs | ||||||||||||||
Comp541 Deep Learning | |||||||||||||||
Comp305 Algorithms and Complexity | |||||||||||||||
Comp301 Programming Languages | |||||||||||||||
Engr200 Probability and Statistical Methods for Engineers | |||||||||||||||
Comp131 Introduction to Programming | |||||||||||||||
Comp542 Natural Language Processing | |||||||||||||||
Ecoe554 Machine Learning | |||||||||||||||
Comp341 Artificial Intelligence | |||||||||||||||
Math101 Finite Mathematics | |||||||||||||||
Comp100 Computer Applications | |||||||||||||||
Math102 Calculus | |||||||||||||||
Students | Ozan Arkan Can, Ph.D. Koç University, 2021. Currently at Amazon, Berlin. | ||||||||||||||
Ulas Sert, M.S. Koç University, 2020. | |||||||||||||||
Cemil Cengiz, M.S. Koç University, 2020. Currently at OBSS, Istanbul. | |||||||||||||||
Berkay Furkan Onder, M.S. Koç University, 2020. | |||||||||||||||
Ekin Akyurek, B.S. Koç University, 2019. Currently PhD student at MIT. | |||||||||||||||
Ömer Kırnap, M.S. Koç University, 2018. Currently PhD student at UCL. | |||||||||||||||
Erenay Dayanık, M.S. Koç University, 2018. Currently PhD student at Stuttgart. | |||||||||||||||
Onur Kuru, M.S. Koç University, 2016. Currently at Searchmetrics, Berlin. | |||||||||||||||
Saman Zia, M.S. Koç University, 2016. Currently at Microsoft, Seattle. | |||||||||||||||
Osman Baskaya, M.S. Koç University, 2015. Currently at Twilio, San Francisco. | |||||||||||||||
Volkan Cirik, M.S. Koç University, 2014. Currently PhD student at CMU. | |||||||||||||||
Emre Unal, M.S. Koç University, 2014. Currently PhD student at Koç. | |||||||||||||||
Mehmet Ali Yatbaz, M.S. 2007, Ph.D. 2014. Currently at Facebook, San Francisco. | |||||||||||||||
Enis Sert, M.S. Koç University, 2013. Currently at Google, Seattle. | |||||||||||||||
Onur Varol, M.S. Koç University, 2012. Currently Assistant Prof. at Sabancı University. | |||||||||||||||
Ergun Bicici, Ph.D. Koç University, 2011. Currently researcher at Boğaziçi University. | |||||||||||||||
Önder Eker, M.S. Boğaziçi University, 2009. | |||||||||||||||
Neşe Aral, M.S. Koç University, 2009. Currently Assistant Professor at Türkisch-Deutsche Universität, Istanbul. | |||||||||||||||
Ahmet Engin Ural, M.S. Koç University, 2008. Co-founder, Arena AI, New York. | |||||||||||||||
Bengi Mizrahi, M.S. Koç University, 2006. Currently at Juniper Networks, Istanbul. | |||||||||||||||
Volkan Kurt, M.S. Koç University, 2005. | |||||||||||||||
Basak Mutlum, M.S. Koç University, 2005. Currently at Microsoft, Chicago. | |||||||||||||||