People
Organizers
Akın Ünver
“Akin Ünver is an associate professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University, specialising in conflict research, computational methods and digital crisis communication. He is the Resident Fellow of Cyber Research Program at the Centre for Economic and Foreign Policy Research (EDAM), a Research Associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs, Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow at GUARD (Global Urban Analytics for Resilient Defence) at the Alan Turing Institute.”
Yunus Emre Tapan
“Yunus Emre Tapan, a graduate of SICSS-Helsinki-18, is a Ph.D. Student in Political Science at Northeastern University. Emre earned his B.A. in Economics from Bogazici University and his M.Sc. in Middle East Studies from METU. His research sits at the intersection of data science and social sciences. He specializes in social network analysis and computational text analysis to study online extremist communities and non-state actors with a particular focus on how they radicalize. He is a graduate of ICPSR Summer Program in 2020 as one of the recipients of the Scholarship for Political Science Research.”
Ahmet Kurnaz
“Ahmet is a PhD candidate at Çanakkale 18 Mart University’s Department of Political Science. Ahmet comes from a computer science background and has advanced knowledge of R. He works on polarisation and political communication online and specialises in text mining and analysis. He was a visiting researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute in 2017 and 2018, and the University of Maryland, College Park in 2015. He was a teaching assistant of SICSS-Istanbul in 2019.”Industry Speakers
Doğuş Kuran
Doğuş Kuran is the CEO of SabancıDX, overseeing the company’s digital transformation operations in the field of advanced analytics, cloud services and cyber security. Previously he served in senior executive positions at Cisco, Microsoft, Ericsson and Accenture, before being appointed as the Executive Vice-President and Chief Customer Officer at Turkcell in charge of the company’s customer and business analytics, data scientist development program, and artificial intelligence-based customer engagement projects. He specializes in large-scale business applications of A.I.-driven data science, as well as mass-training of data scientists for a large portfolio of advanced business and industry analytics roles.Lecturers
Kemal Oflazer
Kemal Oflazer received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and his MS in Computer Science and BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering degrees from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Heis currently a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University – Qatar, where he is also the Associate Dean for Research. He has held visiting positions at Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University, and at the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Prior to joining CMU-Qatar, he was on the faculties of Sabanci University in Istanbul Turkey and Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, 19 years. Kemal Oflazer is currently serving as an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and ELEKTRIK(Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences), and has served or is currently serving on the Editorial Boards of Computational Linguistics, Journal of AI Research, Machine Translation, Research on Language and Computation, Natural Language Engineering and Language Resources and Evaluation. He was a Book Reviews Editor for Natural Language Engineering and a member of the advisory boards of John Benjamins NLP Book Series and Springer Briefs in NLP. He also served as the Program Co-Chair of ACL 2005 -- 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, in 2005 and as a Senior Area Chair or Area Chair for ACL EMNLP, EACL and COLING conferences. Over the last 30 years, Kemal Oflazer has worked extensively on developing NLP techniques and computational resources for Turkish with his collaborators and graduate students and has published over 150 papers. He has recently edited a compendium of work on Turkish language and speech processing which has been published by [Springer](https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319901633)- [for a table of contents](http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ko/toc.pdf). In addition to his long-standing interest in Turkish NLP, he has recently been working on applying NLP in educational settings on techniques such as interactive reading, question generation, question similarity detection and question answering on technical domains with an eye towards developing automated course assistants.
Ceren Budak
Ceren Budak is an Assistant Professor of Information at the School of Information and an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Her research interests lie in the area of computational social science. She utilizes network science, machine learning, and crowdsourcing methods and draws from scientific knowledge across multiple social science communities to contribute computational methods to the field of political communication.
Erdem Yörük
Erdem Yörük is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University and an Associate Member in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at University of Oxford. He is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project Emerging Welfare [The New Politics of Welfare Towards an 'Emerging Markets' Welfare State Regime] (emw.ku.edu.tr). He is also a member of Young Academy of Europe and an associate editor of EuropeanReview. He holds a PhD from the Department of Sociology at Johns HopkinsUniversity (2012), an MA in Sociology and a BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Boğaziçi University. His work focuses on social welfare and social policy, social movements, political sociology, and comparative and historical sociology. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, European Commission Marie Curie CIG, European Research Council, European Commission Twinning Action Grants (socialcomquant.ku.edu.tr), and the Science Academy of Turkey BAGEP. His articles have appeared in World Development, Governance, Politics & Society, New Left Review, Current Sociology, South Atlantic Quarterly, International Journal of Communication, Social Policy and Administration, Social Indicators Research, among others. His book, ‘The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey’ is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
Tuba Bircan
Interdisciplinary researcher, data-lover by birth and social scientist by choice. She currently works as an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and is the research coordinator of the Interface Demography research group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. She is also affiliated as a senior research associate at HIVA (KU Leuven). Her scholarly interests cover a wide range from migration, refugees, inequalities, equal opportunities, social and public policies to new methodologies and use of Big Data and AI for studying societal challenges. She believes in open science and science for society.
Özge Öner
Özge Öner is an Assistant Professor in Real Estate and Spatial Economics at the Land Economy Department and Fellow in Economics at Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Research Fellow at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) in Stockholm. Öner earned her PhD in Economics with a focus on Urban and Regional Economics in Jönköping, Sweden, in 2014. She completed part of her PhD studies at the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory (REAL), University of Illinois. Özge’s research deals with migration and labour mobility, micro-geography of segregation and ethnic enclaves, retail and service geography, the geography of entrepreneurship, as well as political geography. She is a former recipient of the Handelsbanken Wallander postdoctoral scholarship in Sweden (2015), Young Investigator Award in Italy (2018), and she is the 2019 recipient of the Young Researcher Award in Sweden. Özge writes monthly columns at the newspaper Swedish Daily (Svenska Dagbladet).
Ali Hürriyetoğlu
Dr. Ali Hürriyetoğlu is a postdoctoral research fellow at Koc University in the ERC projects “Emerging Welfare” (EMW) and “Social ComQuant: Excelling in Computational and Quantitative Social Sciences in Turkey”. He is performing research and coordinating the work-package related to automatically collecting a multi-country and multilingual protest events (contentious politics) database from local news sources in EMW. He is responsible from computational social science aspects in the Social ComQuant Project. He teaches text mining and Social Sciences and Computing related courses. Mr. Hürriyetoğlu performed research on extracting actionable information from social media in the scope of his Ph.D. studies. He has been working in industrial, governmental, and academic settings to process news and social media text in various domains throughout his career. His recent research focus is on the robustness and the generalizability of text processing systems across contexts.Alumni Speakers
Burak Ozturan
Burak Özturan is a Ph.D. Student in Network Science at Northeastern University, a graduate of SICSS-Istanbul-20. He will receive a master degree in Data Science at the University of Konstanz (Germany) this summer. He completed a bachelor in Economics at Boğaziçi University with honours. Currently, he is investigating the online vaccine disinformation on Twittersphere, where he exploits the social network analysis and the computational text analysis techniques. He has given numerous lectures on programming languages, statistics, and social science research methods. He presented his research at ECPR-20 (European Consortium for Political Research) and will present at the Networks 2021 conference.
Hossein Kermani
Hossein Kermani, PhD in Social Communication Science (University of Tehran), is studying social media, digital repression, computational propaganda, and political activism in restrictive contexts, with a especial focus on Iran. His research mainly revolves around the discursive power of social media in making meaning, shaping practices, changing the microphysics of power and playing with the political, cultural and social structures in Iran. Hossein will join POLCOM research group at University of Vienna soon.Participants
Aybuke Atalay
“Aybuke Atalay is a PhD student in Politics at the University of Edinburgh. She holds a MSc in International Relations. Her research focuses on disinformation and computational propaganda in Turkey. She is particularly interested in political bot networks in Twitter.”
Ege Ötenen
“Ege Ötenen is a cognitive psychology master’s student at Sabanci University, Istanbul. She is interested in phenomenological characteristics, and visual imagery of autobiographical memories. She loves to read and learn about big data and how to combine it with memory.”
Özgür Can Seçkin
“Özgür Can Seçkin is a MSc Data Science student at Sabancı University. He started working on sentiment analysis with NLP, other machine learning algorithms and web scraping while he was doing his undergraduate in Galatasaray University Economics. After graduation, he got a job at İş Bankası as a credit analyst, where he was involved in projects about credit risk evaluation, monitoring and loan automation. His objective is to create a better understanding about how society works, using data.”
Erman Ermihan
“Erman Ermihan is currently pursuing a PhD in International Relations at Kadir Has University. Erman’s research interests revolve around EU-Turkey relations, Turkish foreign policy, emotions and identity, and climate security. He is interested in developing his thesis through computational methods. He received his MA from Sabancı University.”
Venia Veselovsky
“Venia Veselovsky recently completed his undergraduate degree in mathematics and international relations at the University of Toronto, and next year will start his MSc at EPFL in Digital Humanities. Venia’s research at the CSS Lab at UofT has focused on social media and music sharing. In the future, he hopes to study computational international relations.”
Umut Duygu
“Umut Duygu is a Political Science M.A. Student at Sabancı University. He holds BA degrees in International Relations and History from Koç University. He worked as an intern for several organizations including United Nations, Istanbul Policy Center and Hürriyet.His His research interests include social networks, media studies, digital diplomacy, misinformation and voter behavior.”
Hakan Ozalp
“Hakan Ozalp is an Assistant Professor in the Knowledge, Information & Innovation (KIN) Research Group. His research explores the impact of industrial and technological change on the platform ecosystems and on the firms, as well as the antecedents of these changes. He taught various courses on innovation, strategy, and research methods.”
Elif Sozer
“Elif Sozer is a Phd student in the Psychology Department at the New School for Social Research. She is broadly interested in human memory, focusing on how communities form and maintain shared representations of the past, particularly via media and communications.”
Didar Tutan
“Didar Tutan is an MA student in Comparative Studies in History and Society at Koç University. Her research interests are sociology of crime and punishment, prison studies, and political economy. She has previously worked on natural language processing projects and seeks to develop her programming skills further to apply quantitative text analysis methods to her research. Didar holds BA degrees in Philosophy and International Relations from Koç University.”
Gizem Kaya
“Gizem Kaya is a master’s student in the International Relations department at Kadir Has University. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from Yildiz Technical University. Her research interests include civil war, armed groups, and post-conflict peacebuilding. Currently, she aims to employ computational text analysis and network analysis methods in her research by focusing on natural resources’ role in the Colombian peace process. She is also a passionate Spanish and R learner.”
Ahmet Yusuf AYDIN
“Ahmet Yusuf AYDIN is a postgraduate student at the Department of Economics, University of Warwick. He holds BA and MA degrees in Economics from Bogazici Unveristy. His research interests are applied microeconomics, firm dynamics, and environmental economics.”
Büşra Mahmutoğlu
“Büşra Mahmutoğlu is currently a research assistant at New York University Abu Dhabi’s Social Research and Public Policy Program. She has a Master’s degree in Political Science from Sabancı University and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University. Her research areas include political sociology, social movements and culture. She is also broadly interested in computational social sciences methods.”
Çiğdem Ünal
“Çiğdem is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include terrorism, its impact on voting behavior and political parties, and political participation in post-conflict societies. She completed her masters at the Sabanci University in the same field.”
Selim Yaman
“Selim Yaman is a Political Science PhD Student at American University’s School of Public Affairs, specializing in political methodology and comparative politics with a focus on text analysis. Substantively, his research revolves around political violence and military coups. He’s also a Fellow in the Center for Data Science at American University, doing editorial assistantship for Political Analysis.”
Yasemin Taskin-Alp
“Yasemin Taskin-Alp is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. In her dissertation, she examines Islamic preschools in Turkey using mixed methods. She has a background in economics, history, and mathematics. Prior to graduate school she worked in policy and research centers in Istanbul.”
Fuat Kına
“Fuat is a PhD candidate at the Sociology Department of Koç University, and a researcher at the European Commission funded Social ComQuant project. He graduated with a B.S. degree in Economics from Boğaziçi University (2015) and received his master’s degree with quantitative research on the relationship between anti-immigrant attitudes and labor precarity in Europe (2018) from İstanbul Şehir University. He currently works on the relationship between social movements, their targets and social assistance programs. He is interested in advanced quantitative techniques on causal inference.”