Greetings! I am currently a postdoctoral research scientist in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. Previously, as a member of the Bionet group, I have been studying the efficient initialization and execution of very-large-scale, real connectome and synaptome driven, single-synapse-level simulations of neural circuits on GPUs for the purpose of understanding realistic neural networks using ablational studies and more. My current focus is the design of computational circuits for understanding the mushroom body and the lateral horn, two brain regions in insects linked with associative and evolutionary memories. I am also one of the main developers of an open-source interactive neuroscientific computing platform called FlyBrainLab (FBL) that enables access to, manipulation of and simulations for fruit fly brain data.
Due to the availability of data in single cell scale and below as well as the similarity of these circuits to those in humans, insect brains are good models for understanding the principles of biological learning. It is my belief that such an understanding can help us design better few-shot learning algorithms, especially for natural sensory data and transfer learning applications.Previously, I have obtained my master's degree in Computer Science at Columbia University and my bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. In addition to my current focus, I am interested in computational neuroscience, machine learning and signal processing in general. I enjoy painting, video game and video game asset development, cooking and graphic design.
In the last few years, I have worked on the applications of machine learning to a variety of problems. I have designed and implemented methods to utilize thermal images to augment vulnerability prediction models for ConEd New York infrastructure. I have worked on a project to build a successor to Google's discontinued Google Flu Trends service. I have prototyped methods for automatic agricultural data extraction from images. I have taken part in research projects seeking to build novel approaches for cross-modal face recognition. You can find my CV here.