AI research engineer, entrepreneur, popcorn fanatic
I love to work on projects that use AI to empower human creativity, productivity, and expression
- Currently working on model scaling with Amazon AGI
- Graduated with BS AI at Carnegie Mellon
- Previously started two startups, taught 1000+ students programming as head TA 👨🏫, and built automated ML pipelines at Mercedes Formula 1 Team 🏎️
- Always finding an amazing community of doers as a Neo Scholar and Innovation Scholar at Swartz Center
Work Experience
- Training and architecting huge models with the scaling team
- Built AI-Native search and merchandising tools for fashion e-commerce companies, allowing users to search products from IG posts, screenshots, our their natural language
- Learned how to talk to customers just as much as I did how to build, fine-tune, and host AI models
- Backed by Unusual Ventures
- Developed the GeSTICS dataset, a multimodal corpus designed to enhance the generation of realistic nonverbal behaviors in virtual agents and human-robot interaction systems
- Creating a new dataset with video, speech, and pose landmarks for the task from 250 hours’ worth of content
- Published to ACM conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA)
- Designed models to detect electric deployment (MGU-K) of F1 cars, achieving a four-fold performance increase
- Architected and deployed an AutoML pipeline to grant 1000+ non-AI engineers the ability to extract insights from 70,000 data channels
- Envisioned an experimental version of the course based on active learning, tripled student size & set a new teaching standard in three semesters
- Directed a team of 16 TAs, taught lectures, and created recitation plans and practice problems to elevate the academic experience for 1000+ students over five semesters
Projects
🪢 LongRoPE (8x context w/o FT)
Implementing LongRoPE paper to expand LLMs context window 8x without fine-tuning and up to 64x with only 1000 training steps.
(ML Engineering, PyTorch)
AI Mathematics Olympiad
Teaching LLMs how to reason over mathematics. Fine-tuning, advanced RAG, and code-execution over open-source models.
(ML Engineering, PyTorch)
🛍️ ShopMyStyle.ai (co-founder)
Developing AI-based tools to help customers search for more personalized products, faster.
Links: website | YC W23 Pitch
(AI Infra, PyTorch, Full Stack)
🫐 Blueberry AI (CalHacks’23)
AI secretary that makes phone calls and resolves issues on your behalf, saving hours lost waiting in queue for customer service.
Links: video demo | devpost | codebase
(OpenAI, LlamaIndex, Web Dev)
💻 Kahoot112
Merged Kahoot’s thrill of competition and Leetcode’s challenge, crafting a competitive programming game.
Links: video demo (see babyface Deniz)
(Python)
🥬 Autonomous Greenhouse
Grew enough lettuce and radishes for a salad (an actually tasty one)! Our greenhouse relied on a layered autonomy model for planning and CV/ML for state estimation.
(Robotics, CV, Autonomy)
🧠 Rewriting Meta’s ImageBind Model to be JSON-Serializable
Revised Meta's ImageBind model for online hosting, enabling it to accept JSON-serializable inputs for remote access.
Links: github repo | example deployment
(AI Infra, PyTorch, Baseten)
⛓️ Blockchain for Supply Chain
Was a member of Palo Alto Research Center's (PARC) Blockchain group. Researched how blockchain technology could be used to improve supply chains.
🍭 Ludens Store (co-founder)
An e-commerce company we built in high school. Sold personalized gift boxes filled with sweets. It was small but gave us a taste of how marketing, website design, and customer service worked.
Initiatives that matter.
🇹🇷 Board Member, Turkish Student Society (Carnegie Mellon)
(Earthquake Relief) Raised $125K to help victims and build container houses after the aftermath of the 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquake (press coverage).
(Election Participation) Organized busses to Washington DC to make sure Turkish nationals living in Pittsburgh could cast a vote in the 2023 Turkish Presidential elections.
📚 Volunteer, Young Guru Academy (YGA)
YGA is a non-profit in Turkey working on the SDGs. I was selected among 50,000 annual applicants with 50 other students to participate in YGA's Social Innovation Leadership Program.
(Education Equality) Traveled to orphanages in several underdeveloped cities to play with the kids, incite interest in STEM, and deliver science robotics kits free of charge to improve classroom resources.
(Accessibility) Designed technologies to assist individuals with visual impairment, which evolved into Turkcell’s Dream Companion application with 200k+ active users.
Links & Contacts
Looking for an SWE or AI engineer? Looking for some product advice? Want to know my favorite color?
I'm always happy to chat. Connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a message ;)
You made it all the way here? Well, here are some fun facts and happy memories.
- Love to travel, been to 18 countries (and counting)
- I wholeheartedly believe Turkish coffee is the best coffee. If you haven’t tried, go to your local Turkish barista (if that even exists)
- I’m the type of person that sings the lyrics incorrectly 85% of the time. Effort counts, right?
- When there’s a lot on my mind, I try to go on a run or meditate (sometimes both)
