Experience

Founding Director, Artificial Intelligence Institute

TÜBİTAK BİLGEM

Leads Türkiye’s national AI institute and its six competence centres (FinTech, Intelligent Manufacturing, Smart Agriculture & Food, Climate & Sustainability, E-Commerce Technologies, Smart Education), working with an ecosystem of 116 partner organisations from industry, SMEs, universities and the public sector. Led the development of BİLGE, a Turkish large language model, and coordinates the Turkic LLM initiative under the Organization of Turkic States. Task leader for AI Act compliance and ethical AI in the BSC AI Factory (EuroHPC JU).

Deputy Director

TÜBİTAK BİLGEM Informatics Technologies Research Institute

Oversaw the Cloud Computing & Big Data, Data Valorization and Software Engineering departments, including the big-data platform for customs enforcement, the 5G-MOBIX autonomous border crossing (EU H2020) and the HumanE-AI-Net EEG-controlled exoskeleton work with DFKI (EU H2020).

Head of Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Lab (B3LAB)

TÜBİTAK BİLGEM

Led a 40-person team running cloud, big data, IoT, AI and digital twin projects, including the Safir platform suite (Safir Bulut, Safir Büyük Veri, Safir Zeka) and EU Horizon 2020 and IPA projects.

Chief Researcher, Big Data & AI Team Leader

TÜBİTAK BİLGEM B3LAB

Built the lab’s AI and data science capability and the Safir Zeka machine-learning-as-a-service platform.

Chief Researcher, Project Manager (Defence Simulation Systems)

TÜBİTAK BİLGEM

Modelling, simulation and control of underwater platforms; computer generated forces and tactical AI for anti-submarine warfare training; HLA/RTI distributed simulation.

Assistant Product Manager, Engineer

Bosch Türkiye

Education

PhD, Control and Automation Engineering

Istanbul Technical University

Thesis: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes

MSc, Mechatronics Engineering

Istanbul Technical University

Thesis: Modelling of Sonobuoy for Position Estimation

BSc, Mechanical Engineering (minor in Computer Science)

Istanbul University

Selected Projects
  • BİLGE: Turkish large language model developed at the TÜBİTAK BİLGEM Artificial Intelligence Institute.
  • Turkic LLM: multinational large language model initiative under the Organization of Turkic States (coordination).
  • BSC AI Factory (EuroHPC JU): task leader for AI Act compliance and ethical AI.
  • 5G-MOBIX (EU H2020): cross-border connected and automated mobility; autonomous 5G border crossing with Ford Otosan and Turkcell.
  • HumanE-AI-Net (EU H2020): EEG-controlled AI exoskeleton, developed with DFKI.
  • StorAIge (ECSEL): AI at the edge for autonomous vehicles and smart appliances.
  • ADACORSA (ECSEL): AI for drone path planning and swarm intelligence.
  • DerinGÖRÜ: AI for public safety, used after the February 2023 earthquakes to reunite missing children with their families.
  • Safir platform suite: national cloud (Safir Bulut), big data (Safir Büyük Veri) and machine-learning-as-a-service (Safir Zeka) platforms.
  • Defence simulation (2005–2018): submarine command and control, submarine tactical simulator and torpedo countermeasure simulation for the Turkish Navy.
Awards
AIPA Artificial Intelligence for the Public Sector Award
AIPA ∙ 2026
Received as founding Director on behalf of the TÜBİTAK BİLGEM Artificial Intelligence Institute.
Gold, Ecosystem Contribution Award
AI Factory Awards ∙ 2024
Best in Machine Learning
Future of Cloud & AI Summit ∙ 2023
Best in Future of Intelligence
IDC Future Enterprise Awards ∙ 2022
Runner-up, Turkey Cloud Technology Awards
IDC ∙ 2020
Best Product Development Award
TÜBİTAK BİLGEM Awards ∙ 2014
Best Research Group Award
TÜBİTAK BİLGEM Awards ∙ 2012
Ship Survivability Solution Award
Ship Survivability Conference, Berlin ∙ 2010
For the Decision Support System for Torpedo Threats (DeSuS).
Languages
100%
Turkish Native
80%
English Professional working proficiency
40%
German Limited working proficiency