Ekrem Serin

I graduated from Bilkent Computer Engineering in 1997. I have 27 years of industry experience. I have been working at MilSOFT for 17 years. I worked as Software Engineer, Lead Engineer, Product Manager, System Architect and Director at MilSOFT. My current position is Director of Products and Technology. Command and Control Systems, Tactical Data Link Systems, Intelligence Systems and Infrastructure products are my areas of expertise.

İsmet Yalabık

Ismet Yalabik received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, in 2004 and in 2007, respectively. During his master's degree he worked as Research Assistant at Computer Engineering Department in Middle East Technical University. After spending many years in simulation industry (KaTRON Ltd.) and industrial automation areas (evoline TR subsidiary of Siemens Industrial Automation) as software team leader and software architect, he joined Amazon Video in 2013. He is currently working on developing world's only complete video streaming service. He also was a former Turkish Judo Champion.

Gökçe YILDIRIM KALKAN

Dr. Gökçe YILDIRIM 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.

Fatma Gülşah Kandemir

Fatma Gülşah Kandemir earned both her B.Sc and M.Sc degrees from METU Computer Engineering department. Beginning her career at Aselsan, she later moved to San Francisco, California in 2013. She worked as a technical leader for an online community and e-commerce startup for 4 years. In 2018, she joined LinkedIn as a senior software engineer and she has been assuming the role of software engineering manager of the recommendations team for the Recruiter product since 2021. Gülşah's recent interests center on harnessing the power of large language models and semantic search to build cutting edge recommender systems.

Gökdeniz 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.

Süleyman Özarslan

Dr. Suleyman Ozarslan holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems from METU. He is a co-founder of Picus Security, the pioneer of Breach and Attack Simulation. Dr. Ozarslan has 21 years of experience in IT security with a particular focus on cyber threats, malware analysis, penetration testing, application security, and security controls. Since 2002, he has trained security experts from numerous countries as part of NATO Advanced Cyber Defence Training Courses, published academic papers, and provided consultancy services to many governmental and industrial organizations.

Meltem Turhan Yöndem

B.S, M.S, PhD from Department of Computer Engineering METU. Worked in many universities including METU, Sabancı, Birmingham, Okan Universities. Working in EU R&D projects. Has many papers on NLP. Working as academic consultancy at SeturTech and Tat Gıda.

Elif 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’ Modelling and Simulation Department in 2015 and is currently working as an Associate Professor at the METU Graduate School of Informatics’ Multimedia Informatics program. Her research interests are serious games, virtual/mixed reality, human and canine movement analysis and reinforcement learning.

Bilgin Aksoy

Bilgin Aksoy received his B.S. in System Engineering from the Turkish Military Academy and his M.S. degree in Informatics Institute from Middle East Technical University. Currently, he is a senior software engineer at Signatrix GmbH.

İbrahim Ardıç

İbrahim Ardıç completed his BS in both Computer, Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Eskişehir Osmangazi University. He completed his M.Sc. in Electrical-Electronics Engineering in 2015 at Hacettepe University with thesis about designing and development of model based software design and development environment. He started working in Turkish Aerospace in 2007. He is now Software Engineering Manager of Turkish Aerospace Industries.

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 in 2014. He has been offering classes at METU SM and CENG graduate programs since 2004. In 2018 he cofounded a payment services company (PayBULL) and exited successfully after 2 years. Currently he is interested in AI and Blockchain technologies.

Burak Goynuk

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. During his career there about 7 years, he worked for the payments engineering team in different roles from software engineer, to senior engineering manager, and tried to help Udemy to by having a scalable, available, performant, robust, and flexible payment system operating in ~250 countries and ~70 million users. For the last ~2 years, he is working at Toolio, a New York based startup focused on retail merchandise planning solutions. He is working there as senior software engineer, and trying to lead platform team at the same time.

Güven 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 left his Ph.D. in METU in 2023. He started working in Havelsan in 2007. He transferred to Arçelik in 2012 and led Machine Learning and Data Analytics efforts until 2019. He founded Artificial Intelligence and Big Data department of TAI. He is now AI and Avonics Software Director at Simsoft.

Nur Öztin Kurak

Çağla Çığ 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 the AI Research Manager at sahibinden.com where she applies her expertise on machine learning, predictive analytics, and human-computer interaction to industry challenges related to e-commerce.

Haldun Yıldız

Haldun Yıldız received his BS degree from Computer Engineering Department at Middle East Technical University. He worked in various IoT projects at Accenture for 2 years. Since 2017, he has been working as Software Architect at Parabol. He is also cofounder of Parabol. He is mainly responsible for mobility analytics, IoT solutions and client-side technologies.

Yavuz Gürcan

Yavuz is an experienced Identity and Access Management (IAM) professional with a background in Computer Engineering, having graduated with High Honors in 2005 from the Middle East Technical University. He began his career at leading companies like Siemens and Garanti Teknoloji, specializing in Application Security and IAM solutions. In 2017, he transitioned to international consulting with Omada, before co-founding triple-ID in 2021 and praktiga end of 2023. As an IAM/IGA Solution Architect, Yavuz works with clients in BeNeLux and Germany, contributing expertise to enhance digital security.

Turgay Çelik

Turgay Çelik received his BS, MSc, and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Hacettepe University, Turkey. With a career spanning over 20 years, Turgay has held technical and managerial roles at various companies such as MilSOFT, Aselsan, Opsgenie, and Bites. Currently, as the Head of Engineering at TUSAS - Unmanned Air Vehicles- Innovative Technologies Department, he leads teams working on AI, ML, command control systems, and autonomous air platforms. Turgay's industrial expertise lies in forming and mentoring Agile Software teams, while he has academic research on software design optimization, distributed systems, and software architecture modeling.

Bahadır Katipoğlu

Physicist. He completed his undergraduate education in Physics at Kırıkkale University and his master's degree at TOBB University of Economics and Technology. He has worked mainly in the fields of System Engineering, DevOps and Backend for more than 20 years, and in recent years has focused on game development. He currently works as R&D team leader at VLMedia.

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.

Uğur GEMİCİ

Uğur Gemici received his B.Sc. (1998) in Computer Engineering from METU and then MBA degree from Boğaziçi University. He is working as Chief Cloud and Security Officer at Etiya where he is leading and managing Etiya Cloud Computing and Information Security strategy and operations. He is responsible to ensure Etiya's cloud infrastructure is secure, scalable, and cost-effective. He's also accountable for developing and overseeing policies and programs to mitigate and reduce compliance, operational, and strategic security risk strategies. Before this, he was heading Product Development and Management at Etiya, where his globally diversified team is responsible for defining and shaping the next-generation Artificial Intelligence driven Etiya Digital Business Platform portfolio. He was also engaged in leading Etiya’s strategic global Digital Transformation projects. Before Etiya, Ugur worked at Oracle Turkey and Accenture Germany in various roles that helped him gain all-around technical and business experience.

Erdem Günay

B. Sc. degree in Computer Engineering, METU, 1999. 4 years in Amsterdam as software engineer. Various roles at Turkcell but mainly hands on solution architect for large scale enterprise application development projects. Currently, CTO at Layermark.

Bilgin Yazar

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bilgin-yazar-808b29113/

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 20+ years of experience and worked on social media technologies where he earned his Ph.D. on machine learning and information flow analysis from METU Computer Engineering Department in 2022. He is working in Amazon since 2021 on Supply Chain Optimization Technologies.

Okan Emir

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.