Aykut FIRAT – Curriculum Vitae, August 2003

 

Northeastern University, College of Business Administration                                   

214 Hayden Hall, Boston, MA 02115                                                                               

EDUCATION

·        Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA.

Ph.D. in Management (concentration: Information Technology), 1998-2003.

·        Miami University, Oxford, OH.

M.S. in Systems Analysis, 1996-98.     

·        Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey.

B.S. in Industrial Engineering, 1992-96.

HONORS & AWARDS

·        Best Paper Award, WITS 2002, Barcelona, Spain, December 2002.

·        Acceptance to ICIS 2002 Doctoral Consortium, September 2002.

·        DuWayne Peterson Fellowship, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998-2002.

·        Most Outstanding Thesis Award, Miami University, 1998.

·        Koc Fellowship, awarded by the largest company group of Turkey, 1996. 

·        Ranked number 31 (in Mathematics) in Turkish Central University Exam among more than one million participants, 1992. 

·        Sabanci Scholarship, awarded by the second largest company group of Turkey, 1992-96.

·        Ranked number 1 in Kadikoy Anadolu High School among 450 graduates, 1992.

RESEARCH INTERESTS and EXPERIENCE

·        Logic-based approaches to semantic integration of heterogeneous databases: Extensive work on contextual knowledge representation and information integration using novel abductive and constraint logic programming techniques. Design and implementation of a prototype mediation system (ECOIN) from parsers to abduction engine, to distributed query processor. Joint work with Harvard Medical School Genome Center and National University of Singapore on applying ECOIN to bioinformatics databases.

·        Semantic web and web services: Work on knowledge representation using RDF, OWL ontologies, and RuleML; automatic selection, composition, and execution of web services.

·        Extracting and querying semi-structured information on the web: Design and implementation of a general purpose, regular expression based wrapper engine, semi-automatic wrapper generator, and a capabilities aware planner/optimizer/executioner. Implementation was commercialized by MIT, and licensed out to ArsDigita Inc.

·        Fuzzy set theory and expert object oriented databases: Extension of CLIPS expert system shell with fuzzy slot values and inferencing capabilities. Experiments on integrating object oriented databases with expert systems, and fuzzy storage and querying capabilities, and their use for Geographic Information Systems.

POSITIONS and WORK EXPERIENCE

·        Northeastern University, College of Business Administration, Assistant Professor of Management, September 2003.

·        Massachusetts Institute of Technology, COIN Research Group, Research assistant, 1998-2003. 

Participated in supervision of numerous MIT Computer Science Master Theses. Recent examples:

o        Befekadu Ayenew, Merging ontologies in the context mediation framework, 2002.

o        Tarik Alatovic, Capabilities Aware Planner/Optimizer/Executioner, 2002.

o        Usman Mobin, A Graphical Metadata Management System for COIN, 2002.

Deployed COIN technologies in Malaysian University of Science & Technology and National University of Singapore for a multi-year project sponsored by Motorola and Malaysian Government, and actively managing overseas research collaborations.

·        IAggregate Inc. (MIT start up providing information aggregation services), Founding member, 2000-01 (was acquired by ArsDigita.)

Developed the proprietary technology and helped ArsDigita during the acquisition process.

·        Cabali Inc. (MIT start up providing agent-based intelligent business process management services), Founding member, 2001 (liquidated one year later.)

·        Miami University, Systems Analysis & Computer Science Department, Research assistant, 1996-98.

Delivered large-scale software systems in C and C++.

·        Halk Insurance, Systems Development Department, Consultant, 1995-96 (during senior year.)

Designed and built a computer simulation model which has been utilized as a learning/training tool in understanding the dynamics of the company operations from the management vantage point.

·        IBM, Istanbul, Software Development Department, Intern, summer 1995.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

·        Northeastern University, College of Business Administration, Assistant Professor, Course: Data Management and Information Analysis, (2003-04).

·        Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Teaching assistant. Courses: Information Technology I, Integrating eSystems: Technology, Strategy, and Organizational Factors, Global Information Systems: Communications & Connectivity among Information Systems (2001-03).

·        Miami University, Instructor. Courses: Introduction to Computing I, II. (1997-98) Uniformly high teaching evaluations (4.25/5.00)

PUBLICATIONS

Thesis

  1. Ph.D. Thesis, (supervised by S. Madnick,  B. Grosof, M. Siegel) Information Integration using Contextual Knowledge and Ontology Merging , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, August 2003.
  2. M.S. Thesis (supervised by Valerie Cross) Fuzzy Set Theory In Object Oriented Databases: An Investigative Prototype Using Versant ODBMS, Miami University, Oxford, OH, June 1998.     

Journal articles

  1. Overcoming Ontological Conflicts in Heterogeneous Financial Information Systems (with S. Madnick and B. Grosof), invited for publication in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.  
  2. Fuzzy Objects for Geographical Information Systems (with V. Cross), Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Vol. 113, pp. 19-36, 2000.

In preparation

  1. Untitled paper with M. Siegel and S. Madnick on context-based virtual merging of ontologies for semantic interoperability.
  2. Untitled paper with S. Madnick and B. Grosof on source selection in the presence of equational ontological conflicts using mixed integer-programming techniques.

Refereed Conference Proceedings

  1. (Best Paper Award) Financial Information Integration in the Presence of Equational Ontological Conflicts (with S. Madnick and B. Grosof), 12th Workshop on Information Technology and Systems, Barcelona, Spain, 2002.
  2. Knowledge Integration to Overcome Ontological Heterogeneity:  Challenges from Financial Information Systems (with S. Madnick and B. Grosof), Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems, Barcelona, Spain, 2002.
  3. The Caméléon Approach to the Interoperability of Web Sources and Traditional Relational Databases, (with S. Madnick and M. Siegel), Proceedings of the 10th Annual Workshop On Information Technologies and Systems, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 2000.
  4. The Caméléon Web Wrapper Engine, (with S. Madnick and M. Siegel), Proceedings of the VLDB Workshop on Technologies for E-Services, Cairo, Egypt 2000.
  5. Fuzzy Set Theory in Object-Oriented Databases: A Prototype Implementation Using Versant ODBMS & Visual C++, (with V. Cross) Proceedings of North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society ’98 , Pensacola Beach, Florida.
  6. FuzzyCOOL: Adding Fuzzy Set Theory to CLIPS Object Oriented Language, (with V. Cross), Proceedings of North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society ‘97, Syracuse, NY.

COMPUTER SKILLS

Advanced knowledge of Java, C, C++, C#, ASPX, Prolog, Lisp, XML, RDF, SQL, Datalog with many years of system building experience.

Detailed knowledge of database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL (both in Linux and Windows), SQLServer, Versant.

Experience with optimization (CPLEX, XPRESS-MP), simulation (SIMAN, PROMODEL, STELLA), statistical (SPSS), and various other packages.

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

Built an online paper submission and review system for North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society ’97 Conference. Refereed for conferences including COOPIS, VLDB, and NAFIPS.

PERSONAL DATA

Citizenship: Turkey

Date of Birth: 1974

Interests: Chess, drawing/sketching, soccer, entrepreneurship.