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.

Tolga Aydın (CE) successfully completed his civil engineering undergraduate studies, along with an electrical and electronic engineering minor program graduating with a GPA of 3.47 in 2022, ranking second among his peers. During his undergraduate studies, he volunteered as a teaching assistant for MATH 104, MATH 212, and MATH 211 courses.

On the academic front, he participated as an undergraduate scholarship holder in the TÜBİTAK project titled "Production of Prototypes by Additive Manufacturing Method Using Fiber-Reinforced Geopolymer Mortars (GEO-3B)" under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zeynep Başaran Bundur. The outcomes of the final project, conducted with his team, were presented in a paper titled "Utilization of Microbially Induced Calcite Precipitation (MICP) for Soil Improvement" at the 2^nd National Symposium of Young Geotechnical Engineers, hosted by the Department of Civil Engineering, Geotechnical Division, Erciyes University, on September 28, 2022, and recognized as the 'best paper' by the Board of Directors.

He is currently pursuing his master's degree at Özyeğin University. In the first year of his master's program, he worked on the TÜBİTAK project titled "Production of Fiber-Reinforced Cement-Based Composites with 3D Printers". His current research focuses on the design of a fiber-reinforced single-piece geopolymer mortar suitable for 3D printer technology, utilizing waste stone wool.

Alara Baransel (CS 2020), completed an internship at Oracle Turkey. During her internship, she honed her skills in cloud technologies, containerization, and virtualization. In the final years of her bachelor's degree, she engaged in academic research on smart load testing methods alongside Assist. Prof. Dr. İsmail Arı, resulting in the publication of her first international conference paper in 2021.

After graduating, Alara began her professional career as an Application Developer at IBM Turkey. Over the course of 2.5 years at IBM Turkey, she worked in various roles. Currently, Alara works as a Solutions Architect at AWS (Amazon Web Services) in London.