BARIŞ ÖZÇELİK

Barış Özçelik received his B.Sc degree from the METU Computer Engineering Department in 2016. He started working in Arçelik in 2015. Currently, he is leading the core cloud team of the Homewhiz IoT Platform, which is a rapidly growing platform, including more than 500K connected devices and more than 20 different appliance types. He is currently interested in distributed cloud solutions, serverless architectures, IoT technologies, and data analytics.

BİLGİN AKSOY

Bilgin Aksoy received his B.S. in System Engineering from Turkish Military Academy and M.S. degree in Informatics Institute from Middle East Technical University. He had worked as the Head of Data Science Department at DataBoss Security&Analytics for 2 years. Currently, he is a senior data scientist at ArinLabs. His main research areas are computer vision, machine learning, and GPU parallel programming.

BURAK GÖYNÜK

Burak Goynuk received both his Bachelors and M.Sc. degrees from METU Computer Engineering Department. He studied Information Retrieval, and Search Result Diversification in his thesis work. He started his career as software engineer in Arcelik R&D centre, and joined Udemy after 1.5 years. For the first 4 years, he worked in the payments engineering team in different roles such as software engineer, senior software engineer, and tech lead. For the last 1 year, he is working as Engineering Manager, is leading money collection side of the payments system, namely the Checkout Team. As part of the checkout team’s mission, he is trying to help Udemy to achieve globalization goal by having a scalable, available, performant, robust and flexible payment system operating in ~250 countries with ~30 different currencies, ~20 local payment methods, and ~60 million users.

CAN AYDIN

Can Aydın graduated from METU EE in 2003. He worked at various firms around the world such as Audinate in Sydney/Australia, TomTom in Amsterdam/Netherlands and as a private consultant travelling around Turkey and Europe. He currently works as a senior software engineer at Esen System Integration.

ÇAĞLA ÇIĞ KARAMAN

Çağla Çığ Karaman received her B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University in 2008 and her M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Utrecht University's Game and Media Technology Master's programme in 2010. She conducted her master's thesis studies on realistic emotional gaze and head behavior generation for robots at MIRALab, Geneva. After returning back to Turkey, she joined Koç University's Intelligent User Interfaces Lab where she acquired her Ph.D. degree on gaze-based activity prediction and gaze-based behavioral biometrics. Currently, she is a research engineer at sahibinden.com where she applies her expertise on machine learning, predictive analytics, and human-computer interaction to industry challenges related to e-commerce.

ÇAĞRI YÜZBAŞIOĞLU

Çağrı Yüzbaşıoğlu has established ISSD in 2009 in Ankara. For the recent 10 years he has been working in ISSD as CEO mainly heading business development department. Main focus of the company is to design and develop intelligent traffic management systems in which traffic engineers, systems engineers, software and hardware engineers take part in. In the recent 10 years time, he has lead ISSD from 2 man start-up to a company that has team of 55 people with market share of %65 in adaptive traffic management systems. Before ISSD, he has worked for Havelsan in Ankara, IBM in Paris/Seoul and Grundig in İstanbul as a senior systems engineer.

EKREM SERİN

Ekrem Serin graduated from Bilkent University Computer Engineering Department at 1997. During the last 14 years of his 23 year career, he has been working at MilSOFT. He worked as Software Engineer, Team Leader, Product Manager in the company. Currently, he works as Products Director.

Elİf Sürer

Elif Sürer received her Ph.D in Bioengineering in 2011 from the University of Bologna. She received her M.S. and B.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from Boğaziçi University in 2007 and 2005, respectively. From 2013 to 2015 she worked as a post- doctoral researcher in University of Milan in the EU Project REWIRE where she developed video games for the rehabilitation of stroke and Neglect patients. She joined METU Graduate School of Informatics’s Modelling and Simulation Department in 2015 and worked on the training of children having Down Syndrome using video games, which was fully supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). She is currently working as an Assistant Professor at the METU Graduate School of Informatics’ Multimedia Informatics program. She is funded by the H2020 project eNOTICE as METU local coordinator as of September 2017 and also collaborates as a researcher in several interdisciplinary national and EU-funded projects. She is also a mentor at METU Design Factory and bang. Art Innovation Prix. Her research interests are serious games, virtual/mixed reality, human and canine movement analysis and reinforcement learning.

EMRAH ŞAMDAN

Emrah Şamdan received his B.Sc (2011) and M.Sc. (2014) degrees in Computer Engineering from METU. Following 6+ years working as a software engineer in several companies in the industry, he transitioned into a product management role. He's very into cloud application development particularly in serverless. He's working as VP of Product at Thundra, a venture-backed company focused on application observability and security. He's a public speaker in various conferences on product management, serverless and DevOps, and also the co-organizer of AWS Community Day, ServerlessDays, DevOpsDays Turkey, and ServerlessDays Virtual.

ERTUĞRUL BARAK

Ertuğrul Barak received his B.Sc. (1998) and M. Sc. (2002) in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University. He started to work in Aselsan in 1998 as a software engineer and worked in different military projects as team member and team leader up to 2014. In 2014, he was commissioned as the manager of the Command Control Software Department in Aselsan and he has continued since then. His main expertise is in the fields of software product lines, software architectures, software processes and military command and control.

Gökçe Yıldırım Kalkan

Dr. Gökçe Yıldırım Kalkan received her B.Sc. degree from the Department of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU) in 2002 To pursue her passion in Computer Graphics, she did her M.Sc. and PhD. graduate studies on this subject at the same department in 2005 and 2014, respectively. She worked in Meteksan Systems between 2002 and 2006. Since 2002, she has taken key roles in many large scale simulation projects. In 2006, she co-founded Simsoft Computer Technologies and since then, she has been the general manager. In Simsoft, she conveys her academic knowledge and industrial experience to the simulation projects as well as the management of the company. Her research interests include visualization of large datasets, physically-based animation and image generators.

GÜVEN ORKUN TANIK

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 led Machine Learning and Data Analytics efforts until 2019. He is now Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Manager of TAI.

HAKAN YILDIZ

Hakan Yıldız is a graduate of METU Computer Engineering, among the class of 2008. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California Santa Barbara in 2014. Yıldız's doctorate research focused on Algorithms, with an emphasis on Computational Geometry. Following his doctorate, Yıldız joined Microsoft, where he worked on a number of distributed full-text search services. He is currently a member of the team that builds Microsoft Defender, the flagship anti-virus product of Microsoft.

MEHMET OZAN KABAK

Dr. Mehmet Ozan Kabak received his B.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, in 2008. He then received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, USA, in 2010 and 2015 respectively. He has worked in various Silicon Valley start-ups (Striim, Optumsoft) and also co-founded start-ups of his own (Stringer Labs, Gordius Technologies). He is primarily interested in Machine Learning, Distributed Systems and Predictive Analytics; particularly their applications in the financial markets and IIoT technologies.

MURAT YÜKSELEN

Murat Yükselen received his B.Sc degree from METU Computer Engineering Department in 2005. While working as a teaching and research assistant in METU Computer Engineering Department, completed M.Sc. degree on distributed AI applications in 2008. He is a software engineer in the industry with 15+ years of experience and working on social media technologies since 2015 at Somera. Current research interests are machine learning and information flow analysis.

OĞUZ BİCİ

Oguz Bici received the B.S. degree in 2005 and the Ph.D. degree in 2010 in electrical and electronics engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey. During his PhD, he performed research on efficient and robust coding of 3d media and participated in EU projects of 3DTV and Mobile 3DTV. Between 2010-2012, he was with Tampere University of Technology and Nokia Research Centre, Tampere, Finland where he participated in H.265/HEVC standardization meetings and some of his patented contributions were adopted in the H.265 standard. In 2013, he was with the video encoding team of Imagination Technologies, UK, where he worked on implementing video encoding standards in mobile chips. In 2014, he returned to Turkey and co-founded Pixery, the parent company of the popular Funimate app used by more than 50 million users worldwide. He is also the CTO of Pixery and Pixery focuses on bringing high performance image/video/graphics processing and AI algoritms to global end users as creative products.

OKAN EMİR

Okan Emir received his B.Sc. (1987) degree in Computer Engineering and MBA (1992) in METU. He holds a Managerial Leadership Program Certificate (2018) from Emory University, Atlanta. He worked as a software developer, database designer and Excel expert. Okan Emir is the founder and manager of Vega Bilgisayar Hiz. Ltd. (1994) Istanbul, working on banking software and Vega USA Consulting Inc. (2016) Atlanta, working for Coca-Cola.

ONUR TORTAMIŞ

Onur Tortamış graduated from METU Computer Engineering Department. He has been working at Defense Industry, Command Control projects for 17 years. He currently works as Technical Lead at ESEN.

ÖMER NEBİL YAVEROĞLU

Ömer Nebil Yaveroğlu received his B.Sc. (2008) and M. Sc. (2010) in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University. He worked on graph theory and bioinformatics during his Ph.D. studies at Imperial College London (graduated 2014). After continuing his research work at University of California, Irvine as a postdoctoral researcher, he joined Google U.K. in October 2015. He has been working for Google Play, finding alternative app models and techniques for efficiently delivering apps through Play Store.

SACİT ULUIRMAK

Sacit Uluırmak received his B.Sc.(1989) and M.Sc.(1992) degrees in Computer Engineering from METU. He worked as software engineer and team leader for the IT Department of Central Bank of The Rebublic of Turkey. He continues his career at the same institution as a manager. He is interested in innovations, IT governance and project & portfolio management.

Taner Ayhan

Taner Ayhan received his B.Sc.(1987) and M.Sc(1989) degrees in Computer Engineering from METU. He worked as management consultant for Accenture in Istanbul and London, assistant general manager in personal banking for Fortisbank, general manager for Citibank Turkey, assistant general manager in retail banking for Anadolubank and Board Member in Anadolubank, respectively. He is the general manager of Turkish Trade Bank since 2019.

TAYFUN ATEŞ

Tayfun Ates received his bachelor degree from Computer Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University in 2015. He has been working as a graphics software developer at Pixery for about 3.5 years. Before joining Pixery, he worked at Kuartis R&D and Milsoft Software Technologies and was mainly responsible for developing software for computer vision & graphics related tasks.

TURGAY ÇELİK

Turgay Çelik received his BS (2003), Msc (2005) and Ph.D. (2013) degrees in Computer Engineering from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. He worked as a Research Assistant at Computer Engineering Department, Hacettepe University between 2003-2005. He has about 15 years of hands-on experience in software industry with different roles such as Software Engineer, Lead Software Engineer, Technical Lead and Product Line Manager at MilSOFT, ASELSAN, and OpsGenie. Since 2018, he has been working as a Technical Leader & Scrum Master at MilSOFT. He is primarily interested in Agile Methodologies, Software Architecture, and Cloud Computing in both academic and industrial context. He also has experience in forming and mentoring agile teams, talent acquisition, and improvement.

VEYSİ İŞLER

YUSUF BEDİZ

Yusuf Bediz received his M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from METU in 2003 and 2006, respectively. His main interests are image and video processing, video codecs and formats and online streaming. He has over 15 years of field experience and he is currently the lead engineer of video encoding team in Alyo since 2012.