3 BS Alumni

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.

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.