Executive Board

Dr. Nazim Kemal Ure obtained his Ph.D. degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2015, and obtained his MSc and BSc degrees from Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in 2010 and 2008. Dr. Ure is currently an Assistant Professor at Istanbul Technical University, department of Aeronautical Engineering. He is also the deputy director of ITU Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Research Center. His main research interests are decision making under uncertainty, deep learning applications for autonomous systems, large scale optimization and development of high performance guidance navigation and control algorithms. Dr. Ure oversaw several research projects with EU, Boeing, NASA, General Electric, AVL, ASELSAN, TAI and TUBITAK.  As of 2017, Dr. Ure is a Boeing Faculty Fellow and EU Marie-Sklodowska Curie fellow. 

Projects: 

Deep Learning Driven Optimization for Large Scale Airline Operations

He is a Professor at the Department of Computer Engineering in Istanbul Technical University (ITU). Since October 2016, He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University, Boston-USA. Between January 2016 – July 2016, he was a Visiting Associate Professor in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), UK. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic and Communication Engineering at Tampere University of Technology, Finland, between June 2015 – September 2015.

Prof. Canberk is a Senior Member of the IEEE, Member of the ACM and Member of the IET. He serves as an Editor in IEEE Transactions in Vehicular Technology, IEEE Communications Letters, Elsevier Computer Networks, Elsevier Computer Communications Journal and Wiley International Journal of Communication Systems. He is a Board Member / Observer of the IEEE 1900.5 Cognitive Radio for Dynamic Spectrum Access and IEEE Tactile Internet Standardization Working Groups. He has been involved in several international conferences as technical program co-chair, symposium chair, demo/poster chair, regional chair, publicity chair, tutorial chair, and TPC member.

Prof. Gozde Unal received her PhD in ECE with a minor in Mathematics from North Carolina State University, NC, USA, in 2002. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA in 2002-2003, Dr. Unal worked as a research scientist at Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ, USA between 2003-2007. She held positions of assistant professor and associate professor at Sabancı University, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences between 2007-2015. In Fall 2015, she joined Istanbul Technical University, Department of Computer Engineering, where she is currently a full professor. She is the founding director of ITU Vision Lab. Her research interests are in machine learning and computer vision.

Particularly, her recent work is focused on both mathematical and machine-learning based solutions to problems in image modelling, segmentation, image synthesis for inpainting and super resolution, medical imaging, satellite imaging and related classification/detection problems. She was the recipient of L’Oreal Turkey’s Female Scientist Award in 2010 in Life Sciences. She received the Distinguished Young Scientist Award (GEBİP) from TÜBA in 2010. She was awarded the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) Career Award of European Commission in March, 2017. Dr. Unal is the founding chair of the MCAA Turkish Chapter. She served as the Technical Program Co-Chair of the MICCAI Conference, 2016, in Greece. She is a Technical Program Co-Chair for Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (MIDL) Conference 2019, in London, UK.  Currently, she is serving as Director of ITU AI Center.

Projects: 

Image Synthesis Using AI

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ayse Tosun is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Computer and Informatics Engineering, Istanbul Technical University (ITU). Prior to joining ITU, she worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu, Finland. She received her PhD in 2012, and MSc in 2008 from Department of Computer Engineering, Bogazici University, Turkey. She is an executive board member of ITU Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Research Center and administrative board member of ITU Institute of Informatics. Dr. Tosun’s research interests include empirical software engineering, more specifically mining software data repositories, software measurement, software process improvement, software quality prediction models, and applications of AI on building recommendation systems for software Engineering. Dr. Tosun has been working with software organizations such as Huawei, Ericsson R&D, IDEA Technology, Trendyol in research and development projects, leading and contributing to EU ITEA, TUBITAK and MEVLANA Research Exchange projects.

Projects: 

Personalized Bug Prediction and Bug Resolution Time Prediction Models (Collaboration with Ericsson Turkey)

Dr. Sule Gunduz Oguducu is a professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Computer Engineering at the Istanbul Technical University. She is teaching undergraduate and graduate level courses. She is the head of the Learning from Data Research Laboratory at the Department. 

Dr. Sule Gunduz Oguducu received a B.S. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1991, and an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, in 1995. Shecarried out her Ph.D. studies from 1999 to 2003 at the Istanbul Technical University. During her doctoral study, she was a visiting research scholar at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada, in the Database Research Group. Dr. Gunduz Oguducu’s research interests are data mining, Web mining and recommender models.

Projects: 

Online Product Recommendation Model Based on Deep Learning

Dr. Altan Cakir received his M.Sc. degree in theoretical particle physics from Izmir Institute of Technology in 2006 and then went to graduate school at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany, from which he earned a Ph.D. in experimental high energy and particle physics in 2010. During his Ph.D., he was responsible for a scientific research based on beyond the standard model searches in the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at European Nuclear Research Laboratory (CERN). Thereafter he was granted as a post-doctoral research fellow at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchotron (DESY), a national nuclear research center in Hamburg, Germany, and then got his present an associated professor position at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Istanbul, Turkey. Furthermore, he was a visiting faculty at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Illinois, USA in 2017. Currently, Dr. Cakir is a group leader of ITU-CMS group at CERN and leading a data analysis group at the CMS detector funded by TAEK (Turkish Atomic Energy Authority) and TUBİTAK. His group’s expertise is focused around advanced machine learning techniques in quantum field theory applications and big data analytics with real-time processing. However, their research is very much interdisciplinary, with expertise in the group ranging from science, detector development, sensors and big data synthesis to economy and industrial applications. Today, he is consulting various companies such as Hürriyet, Demirören Teknoloji, Doğuş Teknoloji, Farplas Manufacturing, Insider, TurkNet, and sharing his expertise in big data application areas, strategies, skills and competencies based on the real-world scenarios. 

Dr. Altan Cakir involved a large number of high-profile research projects at CERN, DESY and Fermilab last fourteen years. He enjoys being able to integrate his research and teaching key concepts of science and big data technologies and applications. Altan Cakir is one of the referees in Journal of Big Data in Springer and executive board member of ITU Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Research Center.