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 Senior Product Manager at Serverless, the leading IaC platform for serverless application development. 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. He's recognized as an AWS Serverless Hero for his efforts leading the serverless community globally.

GÖKÇE YILDIRIM 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.

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.

GÖKHAN ÖNAL

Gökhan ÖNAL received his M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the RWTH University, Germany in 2010. He worked at Siemens AG on the development of HVDC&FACTS systems till 2016. Then, he has co-founded Lean Power Solutions and he has been providing solutions to manufacturers, network operators and consulting companies. He has been involved in the development of several wind turbine, HVDC, STATCOM and similar technologies. In 2020, he co-founded LpsChain informatics company that provides block-chain based data storage, transfer and management services. Currently, Önal is the CEO of the Lean Power Solutions and LpsChain Ltd companies.

EDA YÜKSEL

Eda graduated from METU with BS (2006) and MS (2010) Degrees in Computer Engineer Department. She has been working in the tech industry for 15 years. After her career in Siemens and TUBITAK, she held the Chief Operating Officer position in VLMedia A.Ş for 5 years and she is now the Chief Research Officer in VLMedia from 2020. She is involved in several research projects on Machine Learning, Image Processing, Mobile UI/UX areas. Her research fields and expertise are Mobile Application Development and Product Design. She is a Tech & Trends follower, official Zumba instructor and mom of two.

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.

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 Lead Software Engineer at the Unmanned Aerial Systems division of Esen System Integration.

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.

BURAK GÖYNÜK

Burak Göynük 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 a software engineer in Arcelik R&D center 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. Now, he is working as Senior Engineering Manager, leading the 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 goals by having a scalable, available, performant, robust, and flexible payment system operating in ~250 countries with ~30 different currencies, ~50 local payment methods, and ~70 million users.

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.

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.

VEYSİ İŞLER

Prof. Dr. Veysi İşler obtained his BS degree in Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University and his MS and PhD degrees in Computer Engineering at Bilkent University. Between 1996-2017 he was a faculty member at Middle East Technical University. Between 2007-2015 he acted as Turkey’s representative at the NATO Modelling and Simulation Group. He is the founder of Simsoft Computer Technologies and has been a professor at the Computer Engineering Department at Hasan Kalyoncu University since 2017.

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.

MELTEM TURHAN YÖNDEM

Meltem Turhan Yöndem completed her BSc, MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University. She was an instructor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University between 2000-2008, the Project manager of the Semantic Web Ontology Generation EU Project at AGMLab between 2008-2010, the Project coordinator of the MODAP EU Project at Sabancı University between 2010-2012 and an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Computer Engineering at Okan University between 2011-2020. Currently she is a senior research advisor at Setur AR-GE and the owner of Kartezyen Danismanlik and Coaching.

KADİR ÇETİNKAYA

Kadir has B.Sc.s from METU Computer Engineering and Mathematics departments. He likes participating in capture the flag and competitive programming contests. His interest areas include compilers, machine learning and operating systems. Currently he is working as a software engineer at Google, developing C++ tools like clangd to improve developer experience.

HALDUN YILDIZ

In 2015, he graduated from METU Computer Engineering Department. He worked in various IoT projects at Accenture for 2 years. Since 2017, he has been working at Parabol as Software Architect. His main work areas are IoT and client-side technologies.

TAYFUN ATEŞ

Tayfun Ates received his bachelor degree from Computer Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University in 2015 and his master's degree from the same department of Hacettepe University in 2021. He has been working as a graphics software developer at Pixery for about 4.5 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.

Fatih Düzgün

Fatih Düzgün received his B.S. (2003) and M.S. (2016) degrees in Electrical & Electronics Engineering from METU. After working 8 years for FİBA Group companies and managing network infrastructure of Finansbank Turkey and Credit Europe Bank Russia, he started a new career at TÜBİTAK. While re-building corporate IT frameworks of essential institutes in accordance with universally recognized data security standards, risk management methodologies, virtualization best practices, and DevOps mindset, he has the honor of managing “Safir Bulut” project at Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Laboratory (B3Lab @ BİLGEM BTE).

TURGAY ÇELİK

Turgay Çelik received his BS (2003), MSc (2005), and Ph.D. (2013) degrees in Computer Engineering from Hacettepe University, Turkey. From 2003 to 2005 he was a research assistant at Hacettepe University. He worked in different technical & managerial roles at MilSOFT, Aselsan, and Opsgenie for more than 15 years. He has 10+ years of professional experience and special interest in forming and mentoring Agile Software teams. He is currently a member of the strategy team at BİTES working on growth, Agile/Digital transformation, and innovation. In addition to his industrial experience, he also published 7 journal papers, 2 book chapters, and 9 conference papers about software design optimization, distributed systems, infrastructure and middleware technologies, modeling and simulation, software architecture modeling, model-driven engineering, microservices, and IoT. He is also an instructor at the Udemy platform and has ~800 students.

GÖKÇE ÖZKAN

Gökçe Özkan is a senior systems engineer and product owner at STM working on the field of agent-based simulation software since 2017. She has a Master’s Degree from the Industrial Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University where she graduated from in 2014, with a Bachelor’s Degree. During her graduate studies between 2014 and 2017, she was employed as a teaching and research assistant focusing on multi-criteria decision making and simulation technologies.

GÖKDENİZ KARADAĞ

Gökdeniz has B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees, from METU Computer Engineering Department. His research interests were on computer security and high dynamic range imaging. He worked as a System Administrator and Teaching Assistant at METU CENG, before joining Google Site Reliability Engineering(SRE) team. As part of SRE's mission of making distributed systems available, performant and robust; he is currently focusing on deployment automation. He is an amateur Bass player, and a proponent of Free Software Movement.

N. ALPAY KARAGÖZ

After graduating from Antalya Anatolian High School in 1995, he got BSc degree from METU Computer Engineering in 1999 and completed his MSc studies at METU Information Systems Department in 2001 and completed his Ph.D. degree in the same department in 2008. Following his position as a Research Assistant in METU for 2 years, he worked as a partner in the Bilgi Grubu for 8 years as a process improvement consultant/trainer/software engineer. Between 2010 and 2014 he served as the manager of R&D, Quality and Test Group at Innova. Alpay Karagöz cofounded Proven Information Technologies with Gökçer Gökdoğan in 2014. He has been working as a lecturer in the Software Management MSc program at METU since 2004 and has actively participated in various conferences as a member of the program committee and the organizing committee and has been involved in research projects.

DEMET DEMİR

Demet received her Undergraduate and Graduate degrees from METU Department of Computer Engineering. Her graduate theses was focused on Behavior Based Robotic Systems. She is now a Ph.D. student at the Department of Information Sytems, METU. Her doctorate studies are focused on Reliability in Deep Learning Systems. During her 20 year of career in the defense industry projects, she took part in many safety critical avionics software and C2 projects as a software developer, team leader and project manager. After having worked for Milsoft A.Ş. and AYESAŞ companies, she joined PROVEN as the Director of Engineering in 2017. She is responsible for all software development projects including Research and Development projects.

EMRE TINAZTEPE

Emre TINAZTEPE is a veteran Cyber Security expert who has been in the industry for 15 years. He is specialized in Reverse Engineering, Malware Analysis, Kernel Driver Development, and Software Engineering. Emre is the founder of Binalyze (https://binalyze.com) - an Incident Response Company developing next-generation solutions for solving the problems of modern incident response. He is a keen learner and a team leader by nature. Apart from actively coding with his team, he is training classes on Malware Analysis and Incident Response both on-demand and a full semester at TOBB ETU University.

NUR KURAK

Dr. Nur Öztin Kurak obtained her BS and MS degrees from the Department of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University. She obtained her Master of Business degree from the University of Waterloo. She had multiple roles at Visa Europe between 2000-2016, most recently the Head of Sector Development. She has been a lecturer at the Centre for Entrepreneurship at University of Toronto since September 2020.

ONUR ARPACIOĞLU

Onur Arpacıoğlu serves as the Director of Artificial Intelligence Applications and R&D in Yapı Kredi Technology. His teams are working on R&D of solutions and products via artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, pattern recognition, blockchain and natural language processing. He has more than 20 years of experience in research, development, technical leadership, project management, product management, people management and group management. For 15 years, he worked in the international R&D division of Netaş where he performed group management and software architect roles to deliver many worldwide telecom R&D projects and releases with his teams. He holds a BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bosphorus University and MS/PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University.

MURAT DOĞANCI

Murat Doğancı completed his BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Middle East Technical University. He worked as a software engineer at Siemens between 1995-1999, as a lead software engineer at Aydin Yazilim between 1999-2000 and as a senior software engineer at Siemens between 2000-2004. He has been with MilSOFT since 2004.

ERBİL KARAMAN

Erbil received his B.Sc. degree from METU Computer Engineering Department in 2009. He has held product, growth and R&D leadership roles in category-defining companies like Facebook, Lyft, and Earnin. Erbil is also an angel investor and the founder of 500 Istanbul venture fund, the most active seed investment firm in Turkey.