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.

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.

Sami Menteş (CS),completed his first-year internship at Microsoft. During his second internship at Periter Research and Technology Inc., the representative company of FLIR Surveillance Inc, he worked on Computer Vision software. During his undergraduate years, he developed an autonomous mapping robot founded by TUBITAK with his dormitory friends.

After completing his undergraduate studies, he pursued a master's degree with a focus on Computer Vision. In his first year, his work was selected for the ML Reproducibility Challenge 2020 and published in the ReScience-C Journal. Later on, under the guidance of Dr. Furkan Kıraç, he and the OzU Vision Lab members published workshop papers at the prestigious CVPR and ECCV conferences, graduating with high honors.

Currently, he works as a Computer Vision Engineer at Fizyr, a leading Computer Vision company in the robotic logistics sector based in the Netherlands.