3 BS Alumni

Dr. Birgül Cansu Acartürk  (CE) completed her undergraduate degree in civil engineering in 2017, finishing as the second in her department. Throughout her university years, she served as both a research and teaching assistant, honing her academic skills. Her undergraduate studies, particularly focusing on sustainable and innovative building material systems, influenced her decision to pursue doctoral education in these areas. She successfully completed her doctoral studies at The Ohio State University in 2022 with a thesis titled "Novel and Sustainable Cementitious Systems: Improving Calcium Sulfoaluminate Cement and Bacterial Concrete Properties."

During her doctoral period, Dr. Acartürk published numerous academic articles on sustainable cement-based systems and bacterial concrete. She also presented her research at national and international conferences. Currently, Dr. Acartürk continues her career as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, where her research is concentrated on bio-based cementitious systems. Her work aims to develop innovative approaches to reduce carbon dioxide emissions during cement production and usage.

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.

Berk Buzcu (CS), graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Özyeğin University in 2020. During his undergraduate years, he had his internship at KoçSistem, where he served as a System Engineer Intern. During his senior year, he worked as a Cloud Consultant in a start-up venture, focusing on cloud systems architecture and also delving into automated negotiation, even participating in the ANAC 2020 competition.

Subsequently, Berk pursued further academic pursuits, enrolling as a Master's Student at Özyeğin University. During this academic journey, he actively contributed to the CHIST-ERA project, "EXPECTATION: Personalized Explainable AI for decentralized agents with heterogeneous knowledge," funded by Tübitak. Within this project, his primary research focus was on the application of explainability techniques in recommender systems, which aligned perfectly with his research interests. The overarching goal was to enhance the effectiveness of recommender systems in helping users achieve their objectives while fostering sociability.

In addition to his thesis research, Berk took on the development of a human-robot negotiation environment and explored other multi-agent-related topics involving Blockchain and drone cooperation. His dedication and contributions led to the publication of five papers during his master's program. Currently, Berk has started working as a Research Assistant at HES-SO, Switzerland on the "Smart-Edge" project where he is working on a healthcare use case for edge computing.