Deniz Yuret
Professor of Computer Engineering
Koç University, Rumeli Feneri Yolu
34450 Sariyer, Istanbul, Turkey
Tel: +90 (212) 338-1724
Fax: +90 (212) 338-1548
E-Mail: dyuret@ku.edu.tr
Homepage: http://www.denizyuret.com
 
Experience Koç University 2002..current
Professor of Computer Engineering at Koç University College of Engineering. Served as the director of the Computer Information Technology Department during 2009-2011, 2013. Served as the founding director of the Koç University İş Bank Artificial Intelligence (KUIS AI) Center (2020-2022). The KUIS AI center is the leading AI research center in the region with 15 AI faculty, 30+ affiliated faculty, and 100+ graduate students, postdocs and researchers, 20+ active sponsored projects.

InQuira, Inc. 2000-2002
Co-founded InQuira - a company that leverages my patented natural language processing technology to provide human interaction solutions for large enterprises. Served as Chief Scientist and VP of Research and Development. InQuira was acquired by Oracle in 2011.

Ascent Technology, Inc. 1999
Worked as a Development Scientist at Ascent - A company founded by Patrick Winston and other members of the MIT AI Lab to apply the results of advanced research to the solution of complex resource planning, scheduling, allocation, and situation-assessment problems. Developed Java applications for airport resource planning incorporating Queuing Theory.


Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
1988-1999

Postdoctoral Research Associate
1999
Worked with Boris Katz and the Infolab Group on the development of the START question answering system.

Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science
1998
PhD dissertation: Discovery of Linguistic Relations Using Lexical Attraction. Advisors: Patrick Winston, Marvin Minsky, and Boris Katz. Minor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Area exam concentration on the Cyc knowledge based system.

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
1994
Master's thesis on genetic algorithms and optimization. Developed the numerical optimization algorithm Dynamic Hill Climbing .

Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering
1992
Bachelor's thesis on genetic algorithms. Research projects in computer vision, digital design and artificial intelligence. Minor in Economics . Worked as an undergraduate research assistant at the AI Lab on genetic algorithms, mobile robotics and machine vision.

Research Natural Language Processing
Current work focused on grounded language acquisition and understanding using deep learning models supported by one Tubitak and one EU project. Previous work includes supervised and unsupervised approaches to syntax, morphology, lexical semantics, language acquisition and machine translation. Developed the Lexical Attraction Theory of linguistic knowledge for my dissertation. The theory attempts to explain how an agent without prior linguistic knowledge can learn to identify linguistic relations using information theoretic measures in example sentences. My program was able to achieve the best unsupervised language learning results at the time of its publication. Worked on the START question answering system developed by Boris Katz. Developed Omnibase, an information extraction system that can respond to database queries using arbitrary knowledge sources on the Web. Created the question answering technology that was successfully commercialized by Inquira, Inc. Member of the editorial board of the Computational Linguistics Journal (2009-2011) and co-organized the SemEval series of workshops (2010-2012). Selected publications:

Barret Zoph, Deniz Yuret, Jon May and Kevin Knight. 2016.
Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp 1568--1575, Austin, Texas, November. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Yonatan Bisk, Deniz Yuret and Daniel Marcu. 2016.
Natural Language Communication with Robots. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp 751--761, San Diego, California, June. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Mehmet Ali Yatbaz, Enis Sert and Deniz Yuret. 2012.
Learning syntactic categories using paradigmatic representations of word context. In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Deniz Yuret and Mehmet Ali Yatbaz. 2009.
The Noisy Channel Model for Unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation. Computational Linguistics. 36 (1): 111-127, March, 2010.

Other Research
Machine Learning: Developed Knet.jl, Koç University deep learning framework. Studied efficient implementations of neural network operators and models on GPU architectures.

Numerical Optimization: Studied Genetic Algorithms with Patrick Winston analyzing population diversity and the problem of local optima. The result was the numerical optimization algorithm Dynamic Hill Climbing, which has found practical applications ranging from medical imaging to neural network training, satellite positioning, molecular energy minimization and regression in econometric models.

Machine Vision: Worked in the machine vision group of Berthold Horn as an undergraduate research assistant developing image processing utilities. Had a short term position in the University of Hawaii to develop X windows utilities for vision research with Shahriar Negahdaripour. Studied applications of 3-D convolutional networks in computer vision.

Computational Biology: Used machine learning methods to investigate protein dynamics, interactions and dynamics of biological networks.

Computational Economics and Finance: Founded Redfire Capital Management Group with Michael de la Maza in 1995 with the purpose of developing agent-based computational models in economics and finance based on artificial intelligence techniques. The company currently has an active research contract in computational economics. Organized two workshops in 1998: Artificial Life VI Workshop on Agent-based Economics and the First Workshop on Agent-based Modeling of Financial Markets.

Mobile Robotics: Worked in the mobile robot group of Rodney Brooks designing the TV circuitry for the robot Attila. Attila was a precursor of Sojourner, the robot NASA sent to Mars in 1997.

Computer Chess: Worked with David McAllester developing the ABC-Search chess algorithm. The world champion chess program Socrates used some of our techniques successfully.

Selected publications:

Saman Zia, Yücel Yemez and Deniz Yuret. 2017.
RGB-D Object Recognition Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. In 28th British Machine Vision Conference, September.
Deniz Yuret. 2016.
Knet: beginning deep learning with 100 lines of Julia. In Machine Learning Systems Workshop at NIPS 2016, December.
Özlem Keskin, Deniz Yuret, et al. (2004)
Relationships between amino acid sequence and backbone torsion angle preferences. Proteins: Structure, Function and Bioinformatics 55 (4): 992-998, June 1, 2004.
David McAllester and Deniz Yuret. 2002
Alpha-beta-conspiracy search. ICGA Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 16--35
Deniz Yuret (1994)
From genetic algorithms to efficient optimization. Technical Report 1569, MIT AI Laboratory.
Michael de la Maza and Deniz Yuret (1994)
A futures market simulation with non-rational participants. In Rodney A. Brooks and Pattie Maes, editors, Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems.

Patents
Deniz Yuret, et al. (2013)
Ontology for use with a system, method, and computer readable medium for retrieving information and response to a query. United States Patents 8,612,208 and 9,747,390. December 17, 2013.
Deniz Yuret (2005)
Method of utilizing implicit references to answer a query. United States Patent 6,957,213 October 18, 2005.

Projects CHIST-ERA (215E201) 2016-2018
Partner in the Chist-Era Project: "Relational symbol grounding using affordance learning".
Tubitak 1001 (114E628) 2016-2018
Researcher in the Tubitak Project: "Learning navigational language from linguistic and visual cues".
Tubitak 1001 (113F092) 2013-2015
Researcher in the Tubitak Project: "A new method for determining critical regions of allosteric proteins based on dynamical analysis of mode coupling".
Tubitak 1001 (112E277) 2013-2015
Principle Investigator in the Tubitak Project: "Natural Language Processing Applications of Unsupervised Word Categorization".
ICT-PSP (270915) 2011-2013
Partner in the European Commision ICT Policy Support Programme Project: "Bologna Translation Service".
Tubitak 1507 (7110376) 2011-2012
Researcher in the Tubitak Project: "Semantic Analysis and Orthographic Normalization in Turkish Legal Informatics".
Tubitak 1001 (108E228) 2009-2012
Principal Investigator in the Tubitak Project: "Word Sense Disambiguation and Semantic Relation Identification Using Statistical Language Models in Natural Language Processing".
Tubitak 1002 (108E257) 2009-2010
Principal Investigator in the Tubitak Project: "The Regression Model for Machine Translation".
Tubitak 1507 (7080848) 2008-2009
Researcher in the Tubitak Project: "Turkish Legal Informatics and Online Legal Search Engine"
Tubitak 1001 (106T553) 2007-2010
Researcher in the Tubitak Project: "Modelling of the Transcriptional Regulatory Network of the Yeast (Saccharomyces Cerevisiae) and Investigation of its Dynamics".

Editorial Computational Linguistics Journal, member of the editorial board. 2009-2011
SemEval3 Semantic Evaluation Exercise, co-organizer. 2010-2012
ACL Semantics Area, co-chair. 2011
Semeval-2010 task 12: Parser evaluation using textual entailments, organizer. 2010
The CoNLL 2007 shared task on dependency parsing, co-organizer. 2007
Semeval-2007 task 04: Classification of semantic relations between nominals, co-organizer. 2007

Memberships KUIS AI Center, Founding Director. 2020-
Turkish Artificial Intelligence Initiative (TRAI), Academic Advisory Board member. 2021-
Turkish Data Depository Project (tdd.ai), Coordinator. 2020-
Turkey's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AITR), Board of Advisors member. 2021-
Turkey Open Source Platform, founding member. 2020-
United Nations Development Prog. (UNDP) SDG AI Lab, Advisory Board member. 2020-
İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Law, Advisory Board member. 2021-
Turkey Artificial Intelligence Consortium, member. 2021-

Teaching Comp200 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Comp541 Deep Learning
Comp305 Algorithms and Complexity
Comp301 Programming Languages
Engr200 Probability and Statistical Methods for Engineers
Comp131 Introduction to Programming
Comp542 Natural Language Processing
Ecoe554 Machine Learning
Comp341 Artificial Intelligence
Math101 Finite Mathematics
Comp100 Computer Applications
Math102 Calculus

Students Ozan Arkan Can, Ph.D. Koç University, 2021. Currently at Amazon, Berlin.
Ulas Sert, M.S. Koç University, 2020.
Cemil Cengiz, M.S. Koç University, 2020. Currently at OBSS, Istanbul.
Berkay Furkan Onder, M.S. Koç University, 2020.
Ekin Akyurek, B.S. Koç University, 2019. Currently PhD student at MIT.
Ömer Kırnap, M.S. Koç University, 2018. Currently PhD student at UCL.
Erenay Dayanık, M.S. Koç University, 2018. Currently PhD student at Stuttgart.
Onur Kuru, M.S. Koç University, 2016. Currently at Searchmetrics, Berlin.
Saman Zia, M.S. Koç University, 2016. Currently at Microsoft, Seattle.
Osman Baskaya, M.S. Koç University, 2015. Currently at Twilio, San Francisco.
Volkan Cirik, M.S. Koç University, 2014. Currently PhD student at CMU.
Emre Unal, M.S. Koç University, 2014. Currently PhD student at Koç.
Mehmet Ali Yatbaz, M.S. 2007, Ph.D. 2014. Currently at Facebook, San Francisco.
Enis Sert, M.S. Koç University, 2013. Currently at Google, Seattle.
Onur Varol, M.S. Koç University, 2012. Currently Assistant Prof. at Sabancı University.
Ergun Bicici, Ph.D. Koç University, 2011. Currently researcher at Boğaziçi University.
Önder Eker, M.S. Boğaziçi University, 2009.
Neşe Aral, M.S. Koç University, 2009. Currently Assistant Professor at Türkisch-Deutsche Universität, Istanbul.
Ahmet Engin Ural, M.S. Koç University, 2008. Co-founder, Arena AI, New York.
Bengi Mizrahi, M.S. Koç University, 2006. Currently at Juniper Networks, Istanbul.
Volkan Kurt, M.S. Koç University, 2005.
Basak Mutlum, M.S. Koç University, 2005. Currently at Microsoft, Chicago.