Eren Bali

Eren Bali is the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of Udemy, the largest marketplace for online courses. Over 20 thousand instructor teach courses on Udemy to more than 6 million students. Udemy is based in San Francisco and has raised $48 million dollars from venture capitalists. Prior to Udemy, Eren worked at SpeedDate (acquired by IAC) as a founding engineer and BitGravity as a developer. Eren graduated from METU (Turkey) with a degree in Computer Science and a double major degree in Mathematics. He won several awards in Mathematics, Physics and CS including a 2nd position in International Mathematical Olympiads. He was also listed in prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2014.

Emrecan Doğan

Emrecan moved to Silicon Valley in 2008 to complete his MBA at Stanford University and still lives in the area to run his venture-funded startup ScoreBeyond. Since founding ScoreBeyond in 2012 to harness the power of mobility and data science for test prep, he has helped more than 1 million students prepare for college entrance exams around the world. ScoreBeyond's learning platform is leveraged in 189 countries and more than 11,000 high schools in the United States. Emrecan previously worked at Amazon Kindle as its Product Lead, at Procter & Gamble as a Brand Manager, and at McKinsey & Co. New York office as an Associate. He holds a B.Sc in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University and an MBA from Stanford University. He currently resides in Palo Alto.

Kamil BugraRodoper

Kamil Bugra Rodoper is an online technologist and a seasoned product leader with extensive experience in product strategy, online marketplaces, and enterprise product development and lifecycles. Kamil started his career at MiKES as the product team leader for Turkish Air Force AWACS Project. In 2005, Kamil joined Microsoft and during his 8 years at the company, he assumed various product leadership roles in Windows Division, Microsoft Business Solutions and, lastly, at Bing. Since 2013, Kamil has been a product executive at Glassdoor, leading B2B product teams. Glassdoor is a start-up that aims to democratize the talent market and located in Silicon Valley, California.

Selçuk Atlı

Selcuk is a serial entrepreneur based in San Francisco experienced in advertising technology, e-commerce and online marketplaces. Selcuk most recently founded Boostable, an advertising technology startup that helps online marketplaces offer advertising services to their sellers. Boostable raised over $3M from 500 Startups, YCombinator, SVAngel and others. Previously he founded SocialWire that helps some of the largest online retailers in the US such as Zappos and Target automate their product ads on Facebook. SocialWire raised over $5M from First Round Capital, 500 Startups, SofttechVC, Cowboy Ventures and others and was a winner of Facebook's innovation awards in 2013. Selcuk did graduate studies on Semantic Web at Rensselaer as a Fulbright scholar and previously studied at Politecnico di Milano, Italy as masters student. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Koc University where he graduated as valedictorian. Selcuk is recognized by Endeavor as a global high impact entrepreneur (endeavor.org) and was the recipient of an innovation award from the World Bank (infodev.org).

Siyamed Sınır

Graduated from METU-CENG in 2003. Worked at SRDC and MilSOFT. Founded Karniyarik.com. Currently working at Wanelo.com. Enjoys movies, music, philosophy and those little sparks in the amygdala. Admires German cars, Japanese etiquette, Soviet marches and Spanish siestas.

Uğur Kaner

Ugur is an experienced product leader, who has designed and built award winning startups and products during the past decade. He currently designs products for Google and mentors startups via respected incubators in San Francisco. Earlier he helped Udemy and Rovio with their products, and founded globally recognized startups providing mobile technology to Nokia and Adobe. Ugur is an SCAE Barista, and an avid health, wellness and adventure sports enthusiast.

Kaan Meralan

Kaan was born in Izmir in 1984. After completing high school education in Karsiyaka he entered METU to study computer engineering. In 2006 he graduated from METU and started to work at MilSOFT (later MilSOFT ICT) where he stayed for three years. Around 2008 he and his 3 friends started to work on a vertical search engine which became a real company called Karniyarik in the summer of 2009. Despite all the efforts Karniyarik didn't last longer than 1.5 years and Kaan decided to move abroad and joined SpeedDate in Silicon Valley. He's been working at Wanelo, a social e-commerce start-up, as one of the founding engineers and living happily as an alien in San Francisco since 2012.

Devrim Yaşar

I wrote my first qbasic program at the age of 12. Started with playing with software and doing little projects on the side at the college in The Netherlands which turned out to be an outsourcing company in Ukraine with quite a few employees very fast. Left outsourcing in 2005 raising $1M+ to my mobile payments company, moved back to Istanbul and implemented it. Moved to New York, Spent 4 years, served as CTO in two startups, did Koding on the side. After my duty at Localresponse, summer of 2011, raised $9M+ for our project Koding, moved to San Francisco with the whole team, and we're enjoying it very much. I love thinking. I usually like to talk about things Wikipedia would cover, I love TED. I find actualities often irrelevant. I'm one of those ones that think 'We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters' yet I also believe 140 characters was a huge and necessary milestone to get there. I love Hackers & Painters, big fan of Paul Graham, Seth Godin, Rob Pike, Aldous Huxley, C. G. Jung, Bernard Shaw, Aristotle, Sun Tzu and people who came from the stars once upon a time.

Oğuz Yılmaz

Oğuz Yılmaz is the CTO of Labris Networks, the Cyber Warfare Company. For the last 12 years, during his career within Labris Networks, he lead biggest network security development team in Turkey and managed production of several network security products in UTM and DDOS Mitigation domains. He lead the team who developed first Common Criteria EAL4+ certified UTM in Turkey and 12 th CC EAL4+ certified perimeter security product in the world. Oguz Yılmaz is also leading a team of security incident handling services with Labris SOC- Turkey's first commercial SOC. He is also founder of HARPP DDOS CERT Service Team with Harpp DDOS Mitigator product line

Ferhat Savcı

Ferhat Savcı graduated from Hacettepe University's Department of Computer Science in 1991. He got his Msc. degree from the same department in 1994. He works at Cybersoft since 1996, where he started his career as a software developer. He currently leads the Cybersoft R&D Team.

Yusuf Sahillioğlu

He received the B.S. degree from Bilkent University, the first M.S. degree from Koç University, and the second from University of Florida, all in computer science. He completed his Ph.D. on the topic of 3D shape correspondence at Koç University in 2012. He joined the University of Pennsylvania Computer Graphics Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in 2013. As of September 2014, he is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey. His research interests are digital geometry processing, computer graphics and vision.

Erbil Karaman

Erbil is the Product Management Lead for Facebook London. During his time at Facebook, Erbil led key efforts such as bringing the product to more than a billion people and initiating the Internet.org project to connect the whole world through affordable internet services. Prior to Facebook, Erbil was a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, working as a founding member of various start-ups in the social space. Since 2010, he has been angel investing in promising tech companies around the globe. Erbil graduated from METU with a degree in Computer Engineering.

Orkun Tanık

Güven Orkun Tanık graduated from METU Computer Engineering in 2006, Electrics and Electronics Engineering in 2007. He completed his M.Sc. in computer engineering in 2010, and is still working on his Ph.D. in METU. He started working in Havelsan in 2007. He transferred to Arçelik in 2012 and is currently leading Consumer Electronics R&D team.

Selim Temizer

Dr. Selim Temizer graduated from The Department of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU) in 1999, ranking first in his department and ranking second in his class. He completed his MS and PhD educations in 2001 and 2011, respectively, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the world-renowned institute for its countless contributions to science and technology like the radar systems, RSA encryption, internet and email, which have shaped the modern world. Dr. Temizer worked as a consultant, team leader, researcher and educator at various times for various companies and organizations and has accumulated significant amount of industrial and academic experience. Since 2012, Dr. Temizer has been working as an assistant professor of computer science and engineering in The Department of Computer Engineering at METU, and conducting research mainly under the areas of artificial intelligence, robotic systems, unmanned vehicles and simulation systems.

Ahmet Oğuz Akyüz

Ahmet Oğuz Akyüz graduated from the Department of Computer Engineering at METU in 2003. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida in 2007. During his Ph.D., he worked as a visiting research for one year at Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. Before returning back to METU as an Assistant Professor, he worked in the OpenGL driver development team at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for three years. Currently, he is working as an Associate Professor at METU Computer Engineering Department. His primary research interests are computer graphics and image processing with an emphasis on high dynamic range (HDR) and color imaging.