“Sharing Experiences” Seminar Series new guest is Erhan Budak

“Sharing Experiences” Seminar Series new guest is Erhan Budak

Sabancı University Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences (FENS) started a new seminar series titled “Sharing Experiences”.

In this new series, faculty members will share their experiences and know-how on certain important academic endeavors with their peers. Aiming for a highly interactive get-together, the series will be a new and exciting opportunity to create an atmosphere where ‘faculty learn from each other’. 

Sharing Experiences Series started with FENS Member Kamer Kaya’s seminar titled ‘High Performance Computing Center of Turkey’ on November 25th, 2020.

In this session, Kamer Kaya talked about his experiences during grant applications and provided many important information and valuable tips to other faculty members who are going through the same processes.

The series will continue with FENS Member Erhan Budak’s talk on December 23rd, 2020 titled ‘A Short Story of Manufacturing Research Lab’ where he will relate his valuable experience on the long and difficult process of building his own lab.

Sharing Experiences Series will continue through the 2020-2021 academic year with many other faculty members and exciting topics that will surely inspire all. Stay tuned…

Sexual Harassment, Gender Based Violence and Discrimination: Research, Action, Narrativization IX

Sexual Harassment, Gender Based Violence and Discrimination: Research, Action, Narrativization IX

SU Gender continues its international webinar series on sexual harassment, gender based violence, diversity and inclusion within and outside the university. In the series, the experts, researchers, and activists from different universities, research centers and NGOs share their experiences.

SU Gender continues its international webinar series on sexual harassment, gender based violence, diversity and inclusion within and outside the university. In the series, the experts, researchers, and activists from different universities, research centers and NGOs share their experiences.

The ninth of the webinar series will take place on December 16. You are welcome to join our webinar by registering via the link below.

December 16, Wednesday 18.00, UTC+3

Struggling With Sexual Harassment and Assault in Turkey: The Case of Universities and Civil Society / Umut Beşpınar, Yıldız Ecevit, Hilal Esmer, Ufuk Sezgin, Gülriz Uygur

Please click here for registration.

*There will be simultaneous translation during the event.

The start up that turns audio and video into text: Scrintal

The start up that turns audio and video into text: Scrintal

Our graduate Arda Ertem's entrepreneurship story begins in Sweden, where he went for his master's studies. After graduating from the Faculty of Management Sciences in 2008, Ertem's path to Sweden for a master's degree in Management crossed with Ece Kural and Furkan Bayraktar, developers of the Scrintal idea. The team was completed when Yusuf Karataş, a student at the Economics Program of Sabancı University, started working at Scrintal 4 months ago.   

(Soldan Sağa) Arda Ertem, Ece Kural, Furkan Bayraktar

(Left To Right) Furkan Bayraktar, Ece Kural, Arda Ertem

Using speech-to-text technology, Scrintal provides audio and video decoding services in 16 different languages. Arda Erdem explains his goals for Scrintal, which also offers opportunities such as text editing, interview analysis, and qualitative data analysis as follows: “The main part of the job that creates value is not to give the data as it is, but to interpret it and make it into meaningful information. At the heart of our growth goal is this conversion.”

We talked with Arda Ertem about his start up story.   

Can we get to know you and Yusuf briefly as two members of the Sabancı family at Scrintal?

Arda Ertem: I graduated from the Faculty of Management Sciences in 2008. Two years after graduation, I was accepted into the master's program in Management at the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden.

After graduating in 2012, I got a job at a small start up based in Stockholm, and I also earned a residence permit that would allow me to stay in Sweden. After that, I worked on Business Development at a global employer brand consulting company called Universum for more than 5 years, I was responsible for Turkey and the Middle East region (Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt). I can say that I reaped the fruits of the responsibility that this adventure had placed on me at a young age in my later works.

After Universum, I had a brief but quite successful experience at Naty, which operates in the fast consumer goods industry. In this process, I worked especially in charge of the European region. Then I worked for a year as a business development director of Intellego Technologies, a start up. In this period, especially due to the highly developed start up ecosystem in Stockholm, my desire to work on my own business began to grow.

I heard about a project that my programmer friend Furkan, whom I constantly asked for advice, was working on with another Turkish friend, and I quite liked the idea. In May 2020, I joined the company as the third co-founder, and in July 2020, we launched the first version of the platform.

Yusuf Karataş: I am a senior student at the Economics Program of Sabancı University. I gained experience working at Sabancı University's Advertising and Marketing Office and various small businesses. I started working at Scrintal as part of Sabancı University's special online internship project this year. After the end of my compulsory internship, I had the opportunity to continue at Scrintal. We have been working together for about 4 months to develop Scrintal.

How was the idea of Scrintal conceived?

Arda Ertem: Ece, one of the co-founders, is currently doing her PhD on climate change at Stockholm University. The difficulties that she experienced in deciphering around 50 interviews she conducted as part of her doctoral dissertation encouraged her to come up with a solution to this problem, and in 2018, she and Furkan came up with the idea of Scrintal.

So far, we have received two grants worth SEK 300,000 from Vinnova, Sweden's Innovation Agency, and SEK 33,000 from Almi, one of Sweden's most important start ups. We have dedicated some of these funds to understanding the workflow and needs of potential users, and in this context, we have conducted interviews with approximately 100 users.

Scrintal basically delivers speech-to-text technology to end users. The server infrastructure, which we have developed with our internal resources, turns audio and video files into text using the services provided by Amazon and Google. The web interface, which we have developed with our internal resources as well, helps our users upload, store, and turn audio and video files into text using our server infrastructure. With our web-based text editor and integrated analysis tools, we can easily edit and analyze the text obtained by users.

Speech-to-text technology is actually not a new phenomenon; it is a subject where companies such as Google and Amazon have been seriously working on and allocating resources over the past few years. For this reason, the rate of accurate conversion of spoken words to text has improved significantly over the past few years. For example, you can now turn a high-quality audio recording into text with 97% accuracy, but since the rate of accuracy depends on various factors such as the clarity of the voice recording, noise in the background, speaker’s proximity to the microphone, each user's experience can be quite different.

There are already dozens of different areas where speech-to-text technology can be used. Researchers, journalists, lecturers, podcast creators, libraries, call centers, and many similar institutions want to turn audio or video recordings into text, access data that they currently cannot use, and get valuable insights by interpreting this data correctly. As Scrintal, we have identified our target group as researchers at the first stage. We continue to add features to our platform that will meet their needs. However, in this process, we continue to conduct needs analysis with other user groups.

You provide deciphering services in 16 different languages. How do you carry out the development process for different languages?

Arda Ertem: Thanks to Scrintal's flexible code infrastructure, this process can be performed very easily when we want to add a new language. But the criterion that matters to us is the quality of the language that will be deciphered, rather than the amount. The languages we already turn into text are those with a certain deciphering accuracy rate. There have been languages that we removed from our list because we were not happy with the performance. On the other hand, we support more than one accent in English and Spanish, the most widely spoken languages in the world.

Scrintal works as follows: It turns the first draft of any audio or video recording uploaded to the platform within minutes. The extent to which this draft needs correction is entirely proportional to the quality of the audio recording and the intelligibility of the sounds. Users complete the correction process either on their own or as a team. They can mark points they consider important in different colors and add notes. When they finish the process, they download the final version of the file to their computer in the format they want.

Assuming that an average of 4-6 hours are spent deciphering an hour-long interview, the most important value we offer to users is reducing this time by at least 50%, thereby maximizing efficiency. When you consider that there have been dozens of interviews as part of a project, we save them dozens of days they would otherwise lose.

Finally, last month, we have started implementing a new service, especially for our customers who do not have time to decipher. For an additional fee, we can also correct deciphering for our customers who do not have time or only request a close-to-perfect output. This way, they do not have to do anything.

Can you tell us about Scrintal's growth goals? 

Arda Ertem: Our vision as Scrintal is to become a single platform that researchers can use throughout all research processes. We aim to transform the product from being just a deciphering platform to a structure where users can perform the analysis they really need. The main part of the job that creates value is not to give the data as it is, but to interpret it and make it into meaningful information. At the heart of our growth goal is this conversion. We are aware that otherwise, as a platform that only does speech-to-text, we will not be able to meaningfully differentiate from our competitors.

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, we can also see that the way they conduct research and give lectures has changed. In particular, as a team, we believe that the effectiveness of cloud-based platforms, where researchers can decipher and analyze their interviews more quickly and synchronously and access this data from anywhere, will increase in the coming years.

In addition, due to the shift to digital education as a result of the the pandemic, we are seriously considering certain solutions as part of our growth plan which will increase the learning efficiency of students in the remote education process and make it easier for students with disabilities or learning disorders to understand video course contents.

It is a pleasure for us to have two members of the Sabancı family in the project. What did being a graduate or student of Sabancı University add to you in terms of working at a start up and gaining an entrepreneurial vision?

Arda Ertem: Thank you very much for your kind words. The most important role that Sabancı University played in my life is that it accelerated the process of going abroad thanks to its vision, as well as the motivation that it gives you and what I learned there. Even after graduation, my connection with Sabancı University was never severed. While working at Universum, we had the opportunity to collaborate within the framework of a 3-year Erasmus+ project under the coordination of Şule Yalçın from the Career Office and her team.

I can say that my vision of entrepreneurship has gained a different dimension, especially in 2019. The most important factor here is not the strong start up ecosystem in Stockholm, but rather the assessments I personally made about what I enjoyed in life and how I wanted to live. As a result of this assessment, I realized that I did not want to continue my career in a corporate structure unless I had to, and I wanted to create something new from scratch, and I decided to take a risk to this end.

“In this context, I think Sabancı University gives a much freer and more questioning vision to young people. When I look back and look at the diversity of courses I have taken, I can easily observe the impact that this wealth of options has had on me.

Yusuf Karataş: For me, one of the factors that makes Sabancı University the most special is the interdisciplinary course selection mechanism that it offers to its students, regardless of their field. Especially when it comes to entrepreneurship and small business management, you need to have some knowledge in many different areas. When your manpower is also limited, it is very important that you have a general understanding of the functioning of issues related to different departments or outside your field. Thanks to the freedom to access information provided by Sabancı University to its students, you have a comprehensive understanding of business management, whether in entrepreneurship or other areas. All you have to do is take an interest in entrepreneurship, and then you can already benefit from the opportunities offered by Sabancı University and its student-friendly approach to education.

“In the Scrintal adventure, of course, we can see a lot of the reflections of this knowledge made possible by being a member of the Sabancı family.

Apcent is growing with Inovent support

Apcent is growing with Inovent support

Established in 2006 to support entrepreneurship in the Sabancı University ecosystem and to bring innovative ideas from within and outside the university to the business world, Sabancı University Inovent has led the implementation and growth of 39 start ups so far. One of these start ups, Appcent offers mobile solutions to companies mainly in the e-commerce and banking industries in different areas such as application development.

Appcent was founded in 2013 with the support of TÜBİTAK 1512. Ozan Uysal, founder of the company, says: “Inovent introduced us to various companies with which it is connected and helped us get to know the industry. It also helped us open an office in Technopark, which gave us a competitive advantage.”

We talked with Uysal about Appcent's entrepreneurial journey.

First of all, can you talk a little bit about yourself and how the idea of the start up was conceived? 

I am a ITU Electronics Engineering graduate. I completed my master's degree in Computer Engineering at Sabancı University. After that, I completed my PhD studies in Marketing at Bilgi University and in Computer Engineering at Doğuş University. After working as an engineer in large companies for 6 years, I quit while working at Turkcell on mobile internet in 2012 to start my own company, realizing the gap in this industry. With the support of Tübitak 1512, I founded my own start up, Appcent.

How did you meet Inovent? 

After receiving Tübitak 1512 funding, I contacted Sabancı University and sought support for my project idea. Inovent liked my idea and decided to support it. We started to reach out to companies in the industry from office in GOSB Technopark.

What were the points where you needed support as a start up? At what points did Inovent meet this need?

Initially, Inovent introduced us to various companies with which it is connected and helped us get to know the industry. It also helped us open an office in Technopark, which gave us a competitive advantage. Additionally, it helped us become familiar with different ecosystems through network meetings it organized abroad.

Can you tell us about your current activities? What kind of service does Appcent offer in which countries?

As Appcent, we have acted as a mobile solution partner for many leading companies, especially in the retail and e-commerce industries, since our establishment. Today, we mainly provide support to our customers in the e-commerce and banking industries in the field of mobile application development and mobile solutions. In addition to Turkey, we also serve large customers in Kuwait. Our plan is to improve our services in the MENA region.

What are your recommendations for start ups like yours? What did you do right? What do you think is the roadmap that can bring success for start ups in Turkey?

First of all, do a good market research and make sure that there is a need. If you cannot identify the need correctly, or if customer expectations are shifting in a different direction, do not hesitate to pivot. That means not falling in love with your idea. You also have to build your team well and allocate responsibilities from the very beginning when partnering.

Can you talk about Appcent's future goals?

Appcent has been a rapidly growing company since its foundation and in this sense, we have become one of the largest companies in the industry. Recently, we have established Appcent Academy to train new mobile application developers in Turkey. Our goal for the future is to become an international company that serves our customers on a wide scale, not only in terms of mobile, but also in terms of software in general. Today, we are planting the seeds of this with 360-degree solutions that we have developed for some of our customers.

Support to Kristen Sarah Biehl Öztuzcu under RWI Human Rights Research Grant Programme

Support to Kristen Sarah Biehl Öztuzcu under RWI Human Rights Research Grant Programme

Kristen Sarah Biehl Öztuzcu, a researcher at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), was found eligible for funding under the “Raoul Wallenberg Institute (RWI) Human Rights Research Grant Programme.” 


The main goal of the “Raoul Wallenberg Institute (RWI) Human Rights Research Grant Programme”, which Kristen Sarah Biehl Öztuzcu is to be funded with her project entitled “Migration, environment, and gender in Turkey”, is to support human rights education and research in Turkey. 

The programme in question also aims to provide support to increase the number of academic studies and publications in Turkey on human rights and current humanitarian law and to encourage young academics to do research on current human rights issues in Turkey and provide them with common study areas. 

Kristen Sarah Biehl Öztuzcu summarized the content of her project entitled “Migration, environment, and gender in Turkey" as follows: “Migration and environment issues continue to be the two most vital issues in the world today. This study aims to discuss these two topics, which are mostly considered independently of each other, on the basis of gender-based phenomena as a common area in which they intersect. We also plan to do this by examining the gender sensitivity and gender approaches of non-governmental organizations that carry out activities related to migration and environment in Turkey. Looking at the literature, it seems that there have been many studies on gender relations with a focus on subjects directly affected by both migration movements and environmental disasters. However, the number of studies that investigate the ways in which gender sensitivity is reflected in activities carried out by non-governmental organizations that conduct intensive studies on these issues and function as a driving force in terms of rights advocacy in most societies is quite limited. Moreover, there seems to be no study that deals with these two areas together. Therefore, the primary goal of this study is to look for ways to think together on the axis of feminist politics by investigating gender-based approaches in the field of migration and environmental studies. 

This study also aims to build various capacities of Sabancı University through its general design. The study will contribute significantly to improving the research experience of Sabancı University's Gender and Women's Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender), which has recently tried to include gender-based issues in its agenda in both migration and the environment with various methods. In addition, young academics studying in Sabancı University's Gender Studies Doctoral Programme will play a key role in the implementation of the project, and the project will provide them with career support in terms of implementing the expertise that they are developing. In parallel with this, the project will increase the impact and visibility of efforts made by Sabancı University, SU Gender in particular, to improve widespread societal effects of academic studies in Turkey with issues that it discusses (migration, environment, and gender) and its chosen approach (role of non-governmental organizations in this field).”  

Gizem Özbaygın has been awarded TÜBİTAK 3501 funding

Gizem Özbaygın has been awarded TÜBİTAK 3501 funding

Gizem Özbaygın, a faculty member at the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences (FENS), Sabancı University was found eligible for the TÜBİTAK 3501 fund.  


Gizem Özbaygın’s project supported under the TÜBİTAK 3501 fund, a career development program, is entitled “Approaches to finding cost-effective and visually attractive solutions for multi-period vehicle routing and scheduling problems.”

According to the project, the goal when discussing problems in the vehicle routing and scheduling literature is to find routes that have the lowest total cost. However, if a route plan consists of routes scattered over large areas and intersecting with each other, it is not always preferred in practice due to a number of operational difficulties or restrictions, even it offers the lowest possible cost. Instead, low-cost, but at the same time “visually attractive” routes can be more easily implemented by planners and adopted by drivers.

In this project, mathematical formulations and effective solution methods will be developed and tested based on optimization for finding visually attractive and low-cost routes with a balanced workload to solve multi-period vehicle routing and scheduling problems. No such comprehensive study that contains all mentioned elements together is not available in the literature. It is expected that the proposed modeling and solution approaches will also guide various rich ARP types that are encountered in practice and have similar elements.

The aim of the project is to evaluate the benefits it can provide in practice by developing and testing effective solution methods for a class of problems that actually exist, but do not have a systematic solution. The success of the developed methods will also be tested on the actual problem data.

Melsa Ararat is once again on the Board of Directors of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN)

Melsa Ararat is once again on the Board of Directors of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN)

International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN), which continues its efforts under the leadership of international corporate investors, held its 2020 Annual General Meeting online. Melsa Ararat, a faculty member at and Director of the Corporate Governance Forum of Sabancı University, was elected to the Board of Directors of ICGN for the fifth time at this Annual General Meeting.

Melsa Ararat said ‘I am honored to be re-elected by receiving 99% of the votes of the Board members of ICGN, which carries out activities impacting the global investment climate. To date, the only corporate member of ICGN from Turkey was the Corporate Governance Association of Turkey.  In 2020, two important investment institutions became corporate members of ICGN: Sabancı Holding and Turkey Wealth Fund. I believe that ICGN's Global Principles for Responsible Investment will be useful to these two important institutions and that their practices will expand ICGN's knowledge.’

In the article that she wrote for the 2020 ICGN Yearbook, Ararat points out that governance issues specific to emerging markets have now become global issues due to the politicization of capitalism, the concentration of partnership structures, and the increased role of the state and the transfer of knowledge between emerging markets and developed markets needs to be enhanced.

First elected as an ICGN governor at the 2015 Annual General Meeting in London, Ararat was the first member and first academic to be appointed to ICGN's Board from emerging markets. Ararat also serves on the ICGN's Global Awards Committee.

An international authority in the field of corporate governance and responsible investment, ICGN (https://www.icgn.org/) is a non-profit company established in 1995 under the laws of the United Kingdom. ICGN brings together investment and corporate governance professionals under the leadership of asset managers and institutional investors managing USD 54 Trillion in assets.  ICGN impacts the investment sector and financial policies by issuing principles, guidelines, and statements.

The Story of 20 Years by Özlem Kalkan

The Story of 20 Years by Özlem Kalkan

To celebrate the 20th year of our university, we have prepared a set of four questions to ask faculty and administrative personnel who have been with us since the beginning, and to our first students. They all tell "the story of 20 years" from their own perspectives.

Going in alphabetical order, this week's interviewee for "The Story of 20 Years" is Özlem Kalkan.

 

Özlem Kalkan has been a member of the Sabancı University family for 21 years. She is one of the first 251 undergraduate students of 1999, when the university opened its doors. Having graduated from the Microelectronics Program, the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences (FENS) in 2003, Özlem Kalkan is one of the first graduates of the university. She completed her master's studies in Leaders for Industry as well as Telecommunications and Business Administration programs at Sabancı University. 

Having started her professional professional career as the Value Added Services Manager at Borusan Telekom during her master’s studies, Özlem Kalkan worked in various positions for the industry's leading telecommunications companies between 2005 and 2019, and became a member of the SabancıDx family as the Chief Strategy and Sales Officer (CSSO) in April 2019. Since February 2020, she has been working as the Chief Sales and Product Management Officer at SabancıDx. Özlem Kalkan is also a founding member of Wtech, the Women's Association in Technology. 

Özlem Kalkan’s answers to our four questions are below.

What was your initial memory / impression of when you met Sabancı University for the first time?

Ö.K: In high school, we would have university tours, we would see all the schools, we would imagine ourselves laying on the school’s lawn, getting lost in great lecture halls; I mean, at least I would. However, I had never imagined myself in the classrooms of a school I had never seen before. Yes, the first thing I remember about Sabancı University is that nothingness! The first time I saw the school was when I went there to take the English examption exam. Let us not call it the school; actually it was just an observation tower (I think only we and Sakıp sabancı could enter there), a dormitory building, a library which was not called the library, a café, a faculty building, and a lot of construction and the smell of turf... “What have I done?”, I said to myself... I guess I took the biggest gamble of my life that day, but I never knew I would win so much! That oasis grew so fast... As if it was not just the buildings that were constructed, it was the knowledge within us... So quickly, special, beautiful, and universal…

What are the differences between yourself 20 years ago and yourself today, and how did Sabancı University contribute to that change?

Ö.K: I am the same because I still keep walking choosing to take big risks, inspired by my adventure of choosing this university, which ended in great success…

On the other hand, I am different because I did not know how to create something from scratch, shoot for the impossible, question, and achieve not on my own or directly from someone else, but together by mutual interaction, discussion, learning, teaching, and improving; I learned that at Sabancı University. And I learned that not in a classroom or a lecture hall or from books, but by first hand experience, I learned that to my bones. And thanks to what I learned, I managed to achieve very successful results in my career. The secret of my achievements comes from a virtue that you cannot see with your eyes or touch with your hands; something unique to this university, something in its DNA. 

What comes into your mind when you think of Sabancı University in 20 years? What are your dreams for Sabancı University for the next 20 years? What about yourself?

Ö.K: There is no stopping for this school. It is always progresses, improves, develops, acquires fame, and acts as a leader. When I think of my university 20 years later, I see a university that has grown with the number of campuses, has become famous and built a reputation all over the world with its graduates, and has made a name for itself and its faculty members in international arena with its academic achievements. This is not a dream; I believe that we will see this picture. I imagine myself as one of the graduates who have planted the seeds of success in this global framework, just like I planted the seedlings of the trees in the campus 20 years age, in whose shade another generation rests.

Where and how would you be now if your paths hadn't crossed with Sabancı University?

Ö.K: If Sabancı University had not opened that year, I would have gone to Boğaziçi University. As I wanted to be an industrial engineer back then and other universities did not offer the freedom to choose your program in the last two years, I would graduate as an industrial engineer (now I am a microelectronics engineer). After school, I would have probably found myself joining a global consulting company, spending many years of busy shifts there, trying to become a partner. I cannot say it is better or worse, but it certainly would have been a safer life with low risks and less opportunities. And I certainly could not have had the chance to write these sentences, because then I would not have been one of the first graduates of a university that was so successful on a global scale! I am so lucky and I am so happy for that... How many times do you say “Thank God” about something in life anyway? Sabancı University is a rare one for me....

SU-IMC Thematic Webinar Series's new guest is Suresh G. Advani

SU-IMC Thematic Webinar Series's new guest is Suresh G. Advani

Sabancı University Integrated Manufacturing Research and Application Center (SU-IMC) Integrated Manufacturing Webinar Series continues with Prof. Dr. Suresh G. Advani's "Emerging Role of Process Models and Simulations in Composites Manufacturing" seminar.

Please click to register webinar. 

Sabancı University Integrated Manufacturing Research and Application Center (SU-IMC) organizes series of thematic seminars/webinars at different levels of academia and industry to understand and prioritize the recent institutional, organizational and technical developments for the Composite Structures. 

SU-IMC Thematic Webinar Series program

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