3 BS Alumni

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.

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.

Sena Artarslan (MSc. IE) works as an analytical consultant under the Supply Chain Directorate at KoçDigital. She provides consultancy services by blending her knowledge in both machine learning and optimization to develop algorithms used in clients' supply chains and integrating them into their processes effectively.

With the contribution of the elective courses she took as a senior at Özyeğin University, she developed a simulation model to test the efficiency of being an agile team at RDC Partner as an internship. In her senior year, she contributed to the predictive quality project that predicts defects in glass production with machine learning. After completing her undergraduate studies, she pursued a master's degree in Industrial Engineering at Özyeğin University, where she also served as a research and teaching assistant. During her graduate studies, she worked as a teaching assistant in the Mathematical Modeling and Exact Methods course. Meanwhile, she conducted research on a version of the Inventory Routing Problem under the scope of TÜBİTAK 1001 and successfully completed her thesis on the same topic. She had the opportunity to present her thesis project at the POMS Conference in France.

After completing her master's degree as of September 2023, Sena continues her career journey in business life and provides consultancy to Turkey's leading companies at KoçDigital by developing solutions that optimize supply chain problems.