Two world-class research scientists who are active in some of the fastest developing areas of Computer Science and Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are joining Sabancı University as Adjunct Faculty members. Dr. Ece Kamar (Microsoft Research, USA) and Dr. Kubilay Atasu (TU Delft, Netherlands) will be contributing to the research and education efforts at SU with their activities in cutting-edge research, undergraduate and graduate level teaching, student advising, thesis supervision, and project development.
We are confident that their valuable contributions will further boost the leading position of Sabancı University in Computer Science and Engineering. In the very near future, we will continue bolstering our strength in these areas with additional names.
Biographies
Ece Kamar is the Vice President and Lab Director of AI Frontiers at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, leading research and development towards pushing the frontiers of AI capabilities. AI Frontiers is a non-geographical, mission-focused lab inside Microsoft Research that explores innovations in foundation models and platform capabilities to push the frontier of AI capabilities, efficiency and control.
Ece’s personal research focuses on developing AI systems that can function reliably in the open world in collaboration with people. She has a decade of experience studying the impact of AI on society and developing AI systems that are reliable, unbiased and trustworthy. She has been instrumental in building the Responsible AI efforts inside Microsoft. She serves as Technical Advisor for Microsoft’s Internal Committee on AI, Engineering and Ethics.
Ece Kamar received her PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University in 2010 under the supervision of Professor Barbara J. Grosz, with her doctoral thesis entitled “Reasoning Effectively Under Uncertainty for Human-Computer Teamwork”. She is an alumna of Sabancı University, having completed her BSc degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 2005. She has been awarded the Robert L. Wallace Prize Fellowship at Harvard and the Microsoft Research Graduate Research Fellowship.
Kubilay Atasu is an Associate Professor at the Delft University of Technology, where he is affiliated with the Data Intensive Systems Section of the Department of Software Technology.
He is a Senior Member of IEEE and the principal investigator of a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) project aimed at building scalable graph ML solutions for financial crime analysis. His research interests include graph algorithms, graph neural networks, parallel computing, hardware acceleration, and their applications to real-world problems.
Before joining TU Delft in January 2024, Dr. Atasu was a Senior Research Scientist at IBM Research – Zurich , where he spent 15 years. Notably, he led a global IBM Research Challenge on scalable and automated graph machine learning from 2021 to 2023. This effort led to new AI-powered real-time transaction monitoring capabilities in IBM’s mainframe software solutions (specifically, in the AI Toolkit for IBM Z and LinuxOne) as well as an IBM Outstanding Technical Accomplishment Award in December 2023.
While with IBM Research – Zurich, Dr. Atasu also taught postgraduate courses at the University of Tübingen and at the Sabancı University. Furthermore, he served in the technical program committees or organizing committees of more than 50 scientific conferences and co-chaired two (IEEE ASAP 2013 and IEEE ASAP 2014 conferences).
Before joining IBM Research – Zurich, he was with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2002–2003), Boğaziçi University Istanbul (2003–2005), and Imperial College London (2005–2008), where he worked on design automation of application-specific microprocessors, and obtained two best paper awards for this work (at the DAC 2003 and at the IEEE ASAP 2008 conferences).