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Fulbright Enrichment Seminar @Denver @ 28-02-2011 09:45

(photo taken by Dag Peak)

Last week I was at Denver for Fulbright's Enrichment Seminar. It was an incredable experience to meet with 140 fulbrighters from almost 70 countries. The enrichment seminars are a tradition and bring together approximately 140 first-year foreign Fulbright students and ten recently returned Fulbright U.S. alumni in nine cities across the United States. The goal of these seminars is to provide the participants with a valuable personal and professional opportunity to meet and network with other Fulbrighters from around the world who are studying in the United States as well as with American citizens in each seminar city. Students develop a greater understanding of U.S. contemporary life and culture, policy formulation and public attitudes concerning issues of national and international importance.

This year, the theme of the seminars is “Greening of the Planet: Global Challenges, Local Solutions.”  We examined the effects of climate change on Denver and local efforts to respond to environmental challenges.

During the seminar, I attended to many talks and workshops about the topic and finally, we divided into 4 groups and proposed our own projects to make the world greener. My group proposed a solution based on bioplastics (Bioplastics are a form of plastics derived from renewable biomass sources, such as vegetable oil, corn starch, etc. rather than fossil-fuel plastics which are derived from petroleum). We couldn't win the competition though, but it was fun to discuss with other scientists about how to apply bioplastics to baby diapers :)

It was a great experience to meet with more than 100 people from almost 70 countries; I even met with a couple of Turkish Fulbrighters and my good friends from San Diego. After the seminar, I found the chance to sightsee around Denver and The Rocky Mountains :) It was quite a pain every night though since I had to come to my room earlier and code my Operating Systems assignment!

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My Projects for Scientific Visualization Class (Cool Stuff Alert!) @ 28-12-2010 09:19

Scientific Visualization (by Prof. Xavier Tricoche) was the most exciting course I took this semester. I worked on several visualization project with VTK (an open-source toolkit for 3D computer graphics, image processing and visualization). All visualizations below are implemented in Python and includes several methods combined together (isosurfacing, color visualization, direct volume rendering,transfer function design, vector visualization and so on).

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Halloween! @ 02-11-2010 08:33

Halloween is absolutely my favorite holiday :) The first time I celebrated halloween was back in 2008, San Jose (I haven't got the enough time to find a costume, though). This time, I had everything ready to turn into a vampire, even fangs :) Here it is! (left: Ilke, right:me)

I think you'll see me as Hit-girl (Kick-Ass) or Daft Punk next year :)

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Notes from Grace Hopper Celebration 2010 @Atlanta @ 04-10-2010 23:30

This year, I had the change to participate and speak at GHC 2010 (held in Atlanta, GA from 28th of Sep-2nd of Oct).  Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is the largest Women In Technology conference in the world:2,147 attendees, 960 students, 280 schools, and 29 countries represented in the conference.

As only about 26% of the presentations submitted were selected, I was delighted to speak at Getting Started in Free and Open Source panel (a part of Open Source track). I'd like to thank to Leslie Hawthorn for organizing this wonderful panel and to my colleagues Selena Deckelmann, Greg Hislop, Deborah Nicholson, Terri Oda who spoke at the panel.

(Photo taken by Terri Oda)

I attended many wonderful talks and panels, but especially keynote speakers were Duy-Loan Le (Senior Fellow at Texas Instruments), Carol Bartz (CEO of Yahoo!) and finally, Barbara Liskov (Prof, from MIT and Turing Award Winner) and all of them were amazing and inspirational. Especially, Carol's advices made me smile. She talked about taking responsibility of our own careers and she said: “sometimes, you just have to be a bitch.” :)

(Photo taken by Gail-Carmichael)

(Photo taken by Terri Oda)

There were lots of give aways from sponsors, including Google, Yahoo, IBM, Amazon, Facebook and many more. I really enjoyed Yahoo's t-shirt saying “we code like girls and are PROUD of it!” :)

You can read many great posts from other attendees from here.

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Purdue Fall 2010 @ 10-09-2010 15:45

It's been a few weeks since I came to Purdue and everything is going great! I've taken Data Mining, Scientific Visualization and Computer Vision classes so far. It'll take some time to settle down to Lafayette and US in general but I really enjoy the campus right now :)

Btw, I really like this P figure; everywhere around Purdue!

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Los Angeles, Disneyland and Hollywood Trip (tribute to Dio \m/) @ 07-08-2010 15:45

I had a wonderful time this week. We went to Los Angeles trip with my friends from Fulbright. It was the first time I visited Disneyland and I ignored the fact that I am a 24 year-old but I enjoyed Space Mountain instead! :) You can see me wearing Minnie Mouse hat in the photo above ;)

Then we visited Beverly Hills, Hollywood and Santa Monica. It was awesome to see Dio's handprints on the floor. Dio, you rock! \m/

A photo of Los Angeles from the hills.

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Fulbright Orientation Program at San Diego @ 28-07-2010 14:43

I am currently at San Diego State University for Fulbright's orientation program. I am with other 35 Fulbrighters from all around the world; Columbia, Gana, Paraguay, Chile, Mozambique, Brazil, Tanzania, Germany, Mongolia, Morocco, Dubai, ... internatinality rocks! :)

Right now, I've been attending to English and American Lifestyle classes in the mornings, and enjoying beautiful weather of San Diego after that :)

Edit: I really liked this photo that I took at Corona Beach :) 

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Anita Borg Retreat at Google Zurich @ 08-07-2010 21:59

Last week I was at Google Zurich office for Anita Borg Retreat. We were about 100 scholars and finalists at Google Zurich and enjoyed talks, workshops and networking. A photo from the retreat:

Keynote speechs from Stephanie Hannon (Google Wave's product manager) and  Corinna Cortes (Head of Research at Google New York) were incredible. Especially I really liked the story of Corinna Cortes on Support Vector Machines. 

I also fascinated by Google Zurich office. I've seen Google's Mountain View office before but Zurich office was absolutely fabolous and fun! We were not allowed to take photos inside Google complex but you can see the official Google Zurich office pictures below. When I saw these pictures a couple of years ago, I couldn't imagine someday I'll read a book at this library or relax at this fabolous aquarium :)

I also took some time to sightsee around Zurich (mostly I spent my time around Lake Zurich, riding sea cycles :)). I also visited Zurich Zoo, you can see the pictures I've taken:

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Graduated from Bogazici University @ 05-07-2010 21:43

After spending 3 tough semesters at Bogazici University, Computer Engineering Department, I finally graduated from master of science program! I would like to thank to everyone including my thesis advisor, Prof. Ethem Alpaydin and all other professors who taugh me during my study. 

You can see me throwing my graduation cap in the air :)

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Going to Purdue University for Ph.D. @ 15-06-2010 13:53

I am happy to announce that I finally made my decision and I am going to Purdue University for my Ph.D. studies!

Purdue is ranked in top 12th in Computer Engineering and top 19th in Computer Science in United States. Purdue University, founded in 1869, has the second largest international student population of any public university in the United States. As a astronomy-lover, I am very happy to learn that Purdue is very famous with its aviation technology and aeronautical engineering programs and it is the highest rated and most competitive in the world. Over one third of all of NASA's manned space missions have had at least one Purdue graduate as a crew member. Neil Armstrong (the first person to walk on the moon) and Eugene Cernan (the last person to walk on the moon) are Purdue alumni :)

I am going to fly to San Diego before arriving Purdue and I'll visit San Diego State University for a month for Fulbright orientation program. I'm very excited about meeting other Fulbrighters from all around the world!

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Google Anita Borg EMEA Scholarship! @ 30-05-2010 15:40

I am happy to announce that I've been selected as one of the scholars for Google Anita Borg Scholarship EMEA! This year, I am also the only Turkish student awarded. The scholarship aims to encourage women to excel in computing and technology, and become active role models and leaders and it is given in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

From Google's Official Blog:

"The Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, established by Google in 2004, honors Dr. Anita Borg, a computer science pioneer who dedicated her life to changing the way we think about diversity and technology. Now in its seventh year, her namesake scholarship continues to support under and post-graduate women completing degrees in computer science and related areas, recognizing and encouraging the next generation of technical leaders and role models.

 

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ICML 2010 and Google Travel Scholarship @ 29-05-2010 22:54

I just received an e-mail from Google, telling me that I've been chosen as one of the two scholars who will be supported to go to ICML 2010, Israel. I am very excited about it, because despite the paper submission deadline has passed months ago, I have a chance to present a poster there! ICML is the leading academic conference in machine learning and hundreds of machine learning expertises will be there so I have the chance to show my work that I've done in my master's thesis and get feedback from them. Yay!

Update: Unfortunately, because of the recent and very sad events (Gaza flotilla raid), I won't be able to attend to ICML 2010 in Israel.

Update #2: After reporting to Google that I am not able to attend to ICML; awesome people@Google send me a big box, full of wonderful gifts! Kudos go to Google :)

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Defended my Master's Thesis! @ 26-05-2010 12:20

Finally, I've successfully defended my master's thesis as a part of Bogazici University, Computer Engineering Master of Science program. As some of you may already know, I've developed an interactive, web-based machine learning framework. I think it'll take a while to announce it to the public; but since the project will be the first of its kind, testing it a bit longer is worthwhile.

I am very thankful to my thesis committee; Prof. Ethem Alpaydin, Prof. Fikret Gurgen and Assistant Prof.Olcay Taner Yildiz and everyone who was with me during the thesis defense. Especially, I would like to thank to my thesis advisor Prof. Ethem Alpaydın for his invaluable supervision, academic feedback, support and endless patience during this thesis. Actually, I should add my "Acknowledgments" page of my thesis here :) Notice the stackoverflow.com!

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"Why Code For Free(dom)?" and "Open Source Security" talks at Bilkent @ 22-03-2010 11:12

This thursday (25 March), I am going to visit Bilkent University to give "Why Code For Free(dom)?" talk-- a talk mostly about the advantages of Free/Open Source software for computer scientists and end users. I will also participate as an invited guest to Prof. Reyyan Ayfer's lecture, "Information Ethics and Security". The focus of my talk at the lecture is predictable; how to manage a security team, how to track vulnerabilities of more than 2000 software packages and also how to deal with different versions of that packages, security advisories and so on. I think at the end of the talk, I am going to convince everyone about why Linux is so secure. =] Please feel free to come by to Mithat Coruh Amfi, Bilkent University if you are around. Finally, I would like to thank Prof. Reyyan Ayfer and BilWic for inviting me to give this talk.

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After QCon London 2010 @ 16-03-2010 10:22

Last week has mostly been taken up with QCon London. I really had a great time and I would like to give a big thanks to Google for supporting my travel and registration costs. QCon is a conference focusing on 19 different tracks. Some to mention: Architectures You've Always Wondered About, Software Craftsmanship, Functional programming,  Irresponsible Architectures and Unusual Architects,  Pragmatic Cloud Computing, Agile Evolution, How do you test that? and Browser as a Platform. I attended to one or two talks from almost every track except .Net and Java oriented ones. Keynotes from Dan Ingalls (Forty Years of Fun with Computers), Ralph Johnson (Living and working with aging software) and Robert Martin, aka Uncle Bob (Bad Code, Craftsmanship, Engineering, and Certification) were inspring. I also got the chance to chat with Dan Ingalls (principal architect of five generations of Smalltalk). I asked him if he follows a method while working (like Pomodore that Dan North recommended in his "Simplicity - the way of the unusual architect" talk). Hopefully, we share a similar characteristic: we can't work if we don't like the job but when we like it, we can't stop working from morning till night.  He recommended me to go where I think I would have the most fun. If something bothers you, it is ok: "If it's hot, it is hot. If it's not, it is not!" There's always something to do when you can't work; empty the rubbish or wash the dishes. And when you concentrate, start to work again -but know yourself very well.

Me and Dan Ingalls

We also talked about the lack of women in computing. He shared some of his observations; for example in a conference about Wikipedia, he observed there are almost same number of women and men. But when it comes to more technical and less social conferences and events, there are really very few women participating. He also added maybe there's a genetic factor about this. He has two boys who cannot stop being "boys" --always breaking/fixing things but in fact, that's what all about the computers! There are lots of ideas and keys to share, here are some main ideas: From Uncle Bob's keynote (slides are available here):

• Follow the Boy Scout rule: Always leave things a little better than you find.
• Methods should be less than 20 lines.
• Don't have a function that takes a boolean. It is clear that it does two things; one if its false, another if its true.
• Cut/Paste is bug replication
• Extract until you drop! Keep extracting until all functions only do one thing
• Source code represent the design -not the UML tools.

Architectures You've Always Wondered About was one of the tracks I wondered about =] Some gems from (Facebook: Architecture and Design) by Aditya Agarwal (Director of Engineering at Facebook):

• Services of philosophy: choose the tool for the right task. They use Thrift, a lightweight software framework for cross-language development (C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Erlang, Haskell, etc.)
• Most important thing in their engineering team: How quickly can you move?

Agarwal said despite being a small team (over 1 million active users per engineer) they do great because of the Facebook culture. There are three very important things in FB:

• Move fast and break things
• Huge impact with small teams
• Be bold and innovate

Agarwal also gave some important tips for MySQL. They have about 6k server-years of runtime experience without data loss or corruption (can you believe it?!) Here are my notes:

• Don't ever store non-static data in a central database
• Data driven schemas make for happy programmers and difficult operations.
• Logical migration of data is very difficult. Create a large number of logical databases, load balance them over varying number of physical nodes.

There are 1,200,000 photo requests a second in Facebook and scaling takes iteration. They serve 20 billion photos in 4 resolutions =  80 billion photos (which would wrap around the earth more then 10 times!)

• They use cachr: cache the high volume smaller images to offload the main storage systems, and only cache 300 million images in 3 resolutions. Then disribute these through a CDN to reduce network latency

There are 400 million unique home pages and 50 million operations per second in Facebook. They have a love-hate relationship with memcache; it is easy to corrupt and has a limited data model. But it is simply crucial and it does what it does, really good. At the end of the talk, I asked to Agarwal about their operating system choice and he told me they are probably  going to use Centos. One of the most interesting talks was Building Skype. Learnings from almost five years as a Skype Architect by Andres Kütt (architect of Skype). First, some stats:

• There are about 650 employees at Skype (which makes 800k users per employee)
• 27.2 billion minutes of Skype to Skype calling per quarter.
• 210k minutes of calls each minute (71k contains video)

Points Kütt made:

• Rules of thumb does not apply: It is always tempting to use patterns that have worked previously but they should be used as a starting point for discussion - not as a solution.
• Functional architecture is important. You neglect how the functionality of your system is organized at your own peril.
• Simply things work. The simplier things are the more intelligent they are.
• Buzz words are dangerous: They are both dangerous as carriers of meaningless chance but also as a catalyst for breaking down relationships.
• Architecture needs to fit your organization. There's no such thing as a beautiful system design. The design either fits what your organization needs or it doesn't.

Dan Ingalls keynote was very entertaining. He showed his early codes and he made all the demonstration in Squeak and also shared demonstrations of lively kernel. One wise quote from Ingalls talk: We're bad at learning the lessons from the past because:

we don’t have enough storytellers and

our generation doesn't listen very well.

I have a lot more notes in my Moleskine but I need to take some time to transfer them into the blog. I also had the chance to visit the gorgeous O'Reilly stand and buy some books (I even have Erlang Programming and 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know signed by the authors!) I had a great time and I look forward to being back the next time. Thanks to Google, again!

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First screenshots of ML-Lab @ 08-02-2010 04:17

In my last post, I wrote that I am going to work on Machine Learning for my master's thesis. I am coding an interactive machine learning framework which enables users to run basic/advanced machine learning algorithms online.

In fact, component based frameworks for collecting together data input/output, pre-processing, classification, clustering, regression and visualization schemes and alike have been implemented before in various languages, for use on different platforms, and operated on a variety of data formats. But unfortunately, due to platform depended solutions, it is difficult to try out and compare different machine learning algorithms quickly and easily. Hopefully, with ML-LAB will provide a sophisticated and easy-to-use wireable interface for creating the workflow. You can upload a dataset, and put a classification algorithm (currently supports K-NN, Naive Bayes and ID3) after it, then wire it to a dimensionality reduction algorithm (PCA, LDA or Isomap), and if you want to, you can wire the results to another algorithm, ... It has no connection limits, you can create a workflow with a hundred connections for a single dataset. The collection of machine learning algorithms are purely implemented in Python and Django is used for interface and matplotlib for the graphics. I'm sharing some screenshots of it, you'll notice it looks like Yahoo! Pipes a lot. Hopefully, it will be online at www.ml-lab.com after the core library finished.

 

 

You can follow ML-Lab on twitter! http://twitter.com/ml_lab

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Application and S.O.P Madness @ 08-02-2010 00:38

Statement of Purpose (S.O.P) is probably the most annoying thing in the graduate school application process. It is very important because it is your only opportunity to speak up for yourself. You have to structure your essay carefully and explain why you are the best and why you're that awesome for the program and unfortunately you have to manage all of these in 500 words (or a bit more for some schools).

I created a wordle cloud from my statement of purpose for Carnegie Mellon. The distribution of the topics seems fine ;) (click on the image to see larger version). Hopefully, the application process is over and the only thing to do now is a long wait. I would like to thank to Suzan Uskudarli, Arman Aksoy, Sarp Centel, Duygu Ozpolat and Elif Surer for their help on my S.O.P.

Note: Wordle is a powerful and fancy tool for creating word clouds. --> Wordle.net

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TUBITAK: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish… * @ 06-12-2009 22:42

By mid of November, I left my job after working two years at TUBITAK UEKAE. I worked with one of the best Open Source teams in Turkey and led Pardus Security Team, therefore I am a bit sad about leaving that early.. Hopefully, the reason for leaving my job leads me closer to my dreams: I have been selected as a Fulbright Ph.D. fellow and hopefully, I am going to continue my education in USA next year. As I am currently doing my master degree at Computer Engineering Department, Bogazici University, I had to give my full energy and time to finish my education in Turkey, so I decided to contribute Pardus as a non-TUBITAK employee.

From now on, I will continue my career in Perceptual Intelligence Lab. at Bogazici University and continue work on my master thesis with Prof. Ethem Alpaydin on Machine Learning.

* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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Fulbright Fellowship @ 21-11-2009 08:09

I am happy to announce that I've been selected as one of the 3 Turkish Fulbright Ph.D. fellows in the field of Computer Engineering this year (40 Fulbright students total). Next year, I am going to move to United States for Ph.D.- but it is too soon to talk about the university.

My profile from Fulbright's website

About Fulbright Fellowship Program: The Fulbright Program is the U.S. Government's premier scholarship program. It enables U.S. students and artists to benefit from unique resources in every corner of the world and students, teachers, and academics from all over the world to study in the U.S. The Fulbright Program provides all the chance to gain international competence in an increasingly interdependent world. The Fulbright Program is the U.S. Government's premier scholarship program. It enables U.S. students and artists to benefit from unique resources in every corner of the world and students, teachers, and academics from all over the world to study in the U.S. The Fulbright Program provides all the chance to gain international competence in an increasingly interdependent world. The U.S. Congress created the Fulbright Program in 1946, immediately after World War II, to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges. Senator J. William Fulbright, sponsor of the legislation, saw it as a step toward building an alternative to armed conflict. The Fulbright 50th Anniversary Commemoration was celebrated in 1996.

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Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009 @ 02-11-2009 06:55

Last week I attended to Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit at Googleplex, Mountain View. It was definitely one of the best time I had in recent years.

Photo by John 'Warthog9' Hawley.

First of all, thanks to Leslie, Ellen, Cat, Chris DiBona and Google Open Source program office and everyone who made this happen (I should also thank to Sam Lantinga (writer of SDL) who let me to use his travel stipend.) My adventure started at Los Angeles; thanks to my Google Summer of Code t-shirt, I met with Fridrich (from Go OpenOffice project) at Los Angeles and we made all way to Sunnyvale from San Francisco with Thorsten (also from Go-OO). After travelling for 20 hours, I went to the opening party at Wild Palms on Friday. It was really nice to see some familiar faces from last year's summit; Donnie Berkholz (Gentoo), Sam Lantinga (SDL), Selena Deckelmann (PostgreSQL), Jacob Appelbaum (Tor), Gary (Pidgin), Marty (Etherboot) and many others that I cannot name now.

Women in Open Source session (bottom + left)

On Saturday, the sessions got started and everybody who wanted to lead a session wrote their ideas and proposed them for vote: the more people add badges to your session, the bigger conference room you get. I proposed a session; Reversing the Trend: Women in Open Source and hopefully, there was quite a lot interest for the session and I found the chance to lead it at the biggest conference room, Tunis. There were really interesting ideas and experiences about the topic and we continued the session on Sunday, too. (I will write about the session and share the notes and thoughts in another blog post, soon.)

Photo by John 'Warthog9' Hawley.

When I got tired of participating to technical sessions, I spent some time at Casablanca session :) Casablanca is a room with full of Play-dohs, toys and this kind of things (as appears in the picture above) and it's for discussing things while playing with toys =) Also I should mention Sam's Solar System session, which we discussed solar system and astronomy applications under Linux and examined some stars and build a solar system with play-dohs for Sam's daughter =)

During the summit I had the chance to meet with awesome people (I wish I could mention all of them, but thanks to jet-lag!), Ryan and Lionel (GNOME \m/), Alistair and Erik (WorldForge), Jason (Limesurvey), Lydia and Leo (KDE), Jon, Josh and his wonderful wife Erin (Inkscape) and Nicolas (GIMP) and many others.

I really appreciate to Leslie and other Googlers who made me to have that awesome time. Also thanks to everyone who participated to write Google Summer of Code Mentoring Guide, so we can read the awesome manual instead of asking the same questions to Leslie. ;) I also had awesome time after the summit with Lionel, Ryan and Jason. Maybe I can write about that trip later, but here's our awesome photo with Android and its releases: cupcake, donut and eclair. \m/

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