3 BS Alumni

Asya (IE) completed her bachelor’s degree with a double major in Industrial Engineering and International Business Administration and Trade at Ozyegin University. During her time at Ozyegin, she excelled academically while actively involved in various extracurricular activities. She served as a Teaching Assistant for several courses and actively participated in the TUSIAD Sustainability Development Forum. She started being involved in research projects and publications. Furthermore, she took on leadership roles as a board member and president of the Outdoor Sports Club, fostering a sense of community and promoting an active lifestyle among her peers. She is also an alumni of the Turkish Entrepreneurship Foundation.

Continuing her education, Asya pursued a master’s in Operations Research at North Carolina State University. During her time at NC State, she took on leadership roles within the Turkish Students Association, serving as vice president and president. Her academic contributions and dedication were recognized through various awards, including the College of Engineering Graduate Merit Award 2019, the University Graduate Fellowship 2019, and the ISE Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award 2023.

Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Transportation Systems, Civil Engineering at NC State, with an anticipated graduation in August 2023. Her research areas include Sustainable Transportation Systems, Humanitarian Logistics, Network Optimization, and Data Analytics. Her Ph.D. thesis focuses on traffic incident response network design, routing optimization, and incident hot-spot prediction. Starting in the fall of 2023, Asya has been offered a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Business Analytics at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

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.

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.