3 BS Alumni

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.

Ece Nur Balık (IE) works as a Business and Data Analyst at KoçZer, one of the Koç Group Companies. Ece Nur completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Özyeğin University Department of Industrial Engineering with a high honor degree. She worked voluntarily for Kahve Dünyası and Fiba Commercial Properties companies with the non-credit summer internship programs offered by our university, during her undergraduate education. She was selected for the international internship program organized by our university for successful students and had the opportunity to see business life in a different culture at Anchor Group in Romania. Ece Nur completed her internships which gave her a variety of professional perspectives, at Adel Kalemcilik and DHL Supply Chain companies on creating value and ensuring efficiency in business processes in supply chain.

Ece Nur, who studied in Finland for 4 months with the Erasmus Student Exchange Program, being one of the students representing our university in the Joost Peters Student Business Challenge held in the Netherlands the next year, developed projects with students from different cultures during her undergraduate period.

In the master's program which she started after her undergraduate education, she worked on the "Open-End Bin Packing Problem with Conflicts", a new topic in the combinatorial optimization literature and adapted various algorithms to this problem, developed a metaheuristic algorithm that would perform better than these algorithms under the leadership of her thesis advisor Prof. Dr. Ali Ekici. She presented her work at the ISCO2022 (International Symposium on Combinatorial Optimization) conference.

Ece (ME), works as a Senior Specialist Engineer in the Truck R&D department of Mercedes Benz Turk A.S. company. As part of her job description, she contributes to the development of electric heavy/medium truck concepts. Gaining experience in the application areas of engineering during her internships, Ece received training in automotive design in 2015 and completed 2 separate design projects during this time. Afterwards, she studied at Pforzheim University as an exchange student with an Erasmus+ scholarship. Between May-October 2017, she worked as a TÜBITAK scholar in the project titled "Dynamics of Drops That Hit Moving Surfaces and Its Use in Surface Coating and Spray Technologies".

In her undergraduate thesis, she worked on the optimization of the anti-roll bar of Mercedes heavy class construction site trucks. With this work she did with her teammate, they won the third prize in the 7th automotive R&D project market and component design competition in 2018. Within the scope of the same project, they also transferred their work to an academic article and this study was published in the International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE), one of the largest mechanical engineering conferences in the world.

After her graduation, she started to work for TUSAŞ Motor Sanayii A.Ş. as a Structural Analysis Engineer. Between the years 2018-2022, she worked in the TEI-TS1400 Turboshaft Engine Development Project, which is Turkey's first type certificated original and national engine. She returned to the automotive sector as of April 2022 and still continues her work at Mercedes Benz Türk A.Ş.