About me

From a young age, I was known as the go-to tech person in my village, solving computer-related issues and staying updated with every development in the computer and mobile phone industry. This passion naturally led me to pursue Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

My dream was to study at Bogazici University, the top institution in Turkey for this field. I achieved this goal, ranking 59th out of 2 million participants in the entrance exam, a testament to my dedication and hard work.

The first two years of my Bachelor’s degree provided me with a solid foundation in mathematics and engineering, thanks to the excellent professors. As my courses became more specialized in electrical engineering, I discovered a deeper interest in computer science, particularly after a programming foundations course in C. This pivotal moment shifted my career focus towards computer science.

To explore this interest further, I sought an internship in the field instead of changing my major. I secured an internship at Getir, a leading start-up in Turkey, focusing on Data Science and Machine Learning for their new GetirFood project. This experience allowed me to gain practical coding skills, understand business decisions firsthand, and contribute to the team’s success in becoming a top food delivery service.

Following my two-month full-time internship, I continued part-time for five months, working on the Business Intelligence infrastructure using Tableau. This hands-on experience in developing reporting dashboards was invaluable.

In my senior year, I joined Getir as a Data Scientist, working for over two years on the Recommendation Team. We deployed a Recommendation Model in production, serving over 4 million clients. My work involved researching Graph Neural Networks for Recommendation Systems, with a focus on Natural Language Processing and Recommendation Engines.

After three years at Getir, I transitioned to a new role as an AI Research Engineer at Codeway. Here, I specialized in Diffusion Models, particularly text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion. I contributed to personalizing these models for our in-house apps and developed a system for applying Dreambooth at scale. One of our fine-tuning experiments successfully went into production.

Currently, I am exploring a new research domain: Talking Head Generation, working primarily with NeRF models. I am dedicated to staying at the forefront of this evolving field.