Research Team >> Postdoctoral Fellows >> Dr. Atakan Erdem

Dr. Atakan Erdem (2017- present)

I received my BSc in Computer Engineering in 1995 from Bilkent University, my MSc from the Computer Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University in 1998, and my PhD from the Computer Engineering department of Bogazici University in 2014. These three universities are top three universities in engineering in Turkey. My PhD research was about developing data mining algorithms in Bioinformatics domains. Throughout my career, I have experienced fundamental research and industrial sector computer engineering in Turkey. I started my career as a junior software engineer at a local company in Turkey and continued as the director of a National Research Institute. During my career, I enjoyed various research and development opportunities in domestic and international venues, spanning public and private sector customers and including a World Bank Project. Prior to joining TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey), I co-founded a start-up company in the field of Informatics. I also served as the Deputy Director of R&D department of Meteksan, a leading defense industry company. After attaining vast experience in industrial sector, I joined TUBITAK in 2002 as a Senior Researcher. TUBITAK is the flagship of applied research in Turkey and employs more than 4,000 researchers from diverse fields of expertise ranging from gene engineering to fundamental mathematics. In June 2012, I was appointed as the Director of Information Technologies Institute of TUBITAK and continued to serve until March 2014. The Information Technologies Institute aims to improve public welfare and security through the realization of projects in the areas of Homeland Security, Decision Support and Intelligent Transportation, Defense Technology, and Sensor and Radar Systems. Each area is led by an Assistant Director. During the last decade, not only private businesses, but also public research institutes and governments are challenged by newer platform technologies, big data and semantic web. Changing the route of my career, I moved academia in 2014, starting as Vice-Chair of Computer Science Department at Istanbul Aydin University. The next stop was the Data Science Lab at Ryerson University. I managed several data analytic research projects that were developed for industries such as IBM and ManuLife. Since February 2017, I've been studying in Jackson's Lab and enjoy putting my academic and industrial work experiences to work on a water data platform project collaborating with IBM-Alberta Centre for Advanced Studies. Beside the software platform development, my research interests in this project are IoT, deep learning (machine learning and artificial intelligence) and big data management.