3 BS Alumni

Ekrem Çetinkaya (CS), graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer science from Özyeğin University in 2018 and completed a master's program with a thesis under the supervision of Dr. Furkan Kıraç in 2019. Between 2019 and 2023, he completed his doctoral studies on Video Encoding with Machine Learning at the University of Klagenfurt. During this period, he worked as a research assistant on the ATHENA project, which was conducted in partnership with Bitmovin. Throughout his 4-year research career, he published over 15 papers in prestigious conferences and journals and filed for 3 patents, one of which has been issued. In 2021, the article he wrote was awarded the "Best New Streaming Innovation of the Year” award. He is currently continuing his academic work in video coding and multimedia fields with Assoc. Prof. Ali C. Beğen.

Cem Ata Baykara (CS) completed his first internship in Big Data at Türkiye İş Bankası. During his second internship at Fibabanka, he worked in the R&D department focusing on Internet of Things (IoT) security. After completing his Bachelor's degree, he started his master's degree in Network Security in 2020. Throughout his master's studies, he worked as a researcher in a TÜBİTAK project, alongside his advisors Dr. Kübra Kalkan and Dr. Ilgın Şafak (from Fibabank). During his master's program, his research primarily focused on IoT security and Blockchain.
Currently, he is working as a doctoral research assistant at Tübingen University in Germany, focusing on privacy-preserving machine learning. He is also working as a researcher on federated machine learning in the PrivateAIM (Privacy-Preserving Analytics in Medicine) project, developed for Germany's Medical Informatics Initiative.

Tuna Tuncer (CS), while a student at Özyeğin University's Computer Science department, served as a Student Ambassador at Microsoft Turkey. Under the supervision of Assistant Prof. Emre Sefer for his graduation thesis, he utilized state-of-the-art neural networks capable of predicting stock price movements and subsequently published and presented a paper at the 3rd ACM International Conference on AI in Finance. He also engaged in research to optimize software continuous integration processes with Prof. Darko Marinov from UIUC, Assistant Prof. Wing Lam from GMU, and Assistant Prof. August Shi from UT Austin, which led to a significant pull request to the apache/shardingsphere project and a paper published in ASE 2023. During his research at Özyeğin, he led the development of a diffusion-based model for video instance segmentation in Assistant Prof. Sedat Özer's lab. Upon concluding his undergraduate studies, he embarked on a Master's degree in Informatics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, where he presently continues to advance his academic pursuits.