Deniz Yuret
Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering
Koc University
Rumeli Feneri Yolu
80910 Sariyer, Istanbul, Turkey
Tel: +90 (212) 338-1724
Fax: +90 (212) 338-1548
E-Mail: dyuret@ku.edu.tr
Homepage: http://home.ku.edu.tr/~dyuret
 
Background Koc University current
Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at Koc University College of Engineering.

InQuira, Inc. 2000-2002
Co-founded InQuira - a company that leverages my patent-pending natural language processing technology to provide human interaction solutions for large enterprises. Served as Chief Scientist and VP of Research and Development. Currently acting as a Research Consultant.

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 Queueing Theory.

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

Postdoctoral Research Associate 		1999
Working 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 Computational Linguistics
Developed the Lexical Attraction Theory of linguistic knowledge. 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 published to date. 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.

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.

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.

Other
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.
Mobile Robotics: Worked in the mobile robot group of Rodney Brooks designing the TV circuitry for the robot Atilla. Atilla 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.

Academic
Honors 		Perfect 800 scores in GRE quantitative and analytical exams. 1992
Top 100, Putnam mathematics competition, MIT team member. 1989
Bronze medal, 29th International Mathematical Olympiad. 1988
Perfect 800 scores in CBAT math and physics. 1988
Top 50 out of 600,000, Turkish National University Exam. 1988
1st place out of 200,000, Science High School Exam. 1985
1st place in Tübitak math competitions. 1985, 1988

Publications Computational Linguistics
Boris Katz, Deniz Yuret, et al. (1999)
Integrating Large Lexicons and Web Resources into a Natural Language Query System. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems.
Ozlem Uzuner, Boris Katz, Deniz Yuret (1999)
Word sense disambiguation for information retrieval. In Proceedings of the 1999 16th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99)
Deniz Yuret (1998)
Discovery of Linguistic Relations Using Lexical Attraction, PhD thesis, MIT.
Boris Katz, Deniz Yuret, et al. (1998)
Blitz: A Preprocessor for Detecting Context-Independent Linguistic Structures. In Proceedings of the 5th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Numerical Optimization
Michael de la Maza and Deniz Yuret (1995)
Seeing clearly: Medical imaging now and tomorrow. In Clifford A. Pickover, editor, Future Health: Computers and Medicine in the 21st Century. St. Martin's Press.
Deniz Yuret (1994)
From genetic algorithms to efficient optimization. Technical Report 1569, MIT AI Laboratory.
Michael de la Maza and Deniz Yuret (1994)
Dynamic hill climbing. AI Expert.
Deniz Yuret and Michael de la Maza (1993)
Dynamic hill climbing: Overcoming the limitations of optimization techniques. In The Second Turkish Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks.
Computational Economics and Finance
Ayla Ogus, Michael de la Maza, and Deniz Yuret (1999)
Modeling the Economics of Internet Companies. Computing in Economics and Finance, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of the Society for Computational Economics.
Michael de la Maza, Ayla Ogus, and Deniz Yuret (1998)
How do firms transition between monopoly and competitive behavior? An Agent-based Economic Model. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Artificial Life.
Michael de la Maza and Deniz Yuret (1995)
A model of stock market participants. In Jörg Biethahn and Volker Nissen, editors, Evolutionary Algorithms in Management Applications. Springer.
Michael de la Maza and Deniz Yuret (1995)
Neural network applications: A critique. The Magazine of Artificial Intelligence in Finance, 2(1).
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.
Deniz Yuret and Michael de la Maza (1994)
A genetic algorithm system for predicting the OEX. Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities.
Michael de la Maza and Deniz Yuret (1994)
Experimenting with a market simulation. The Magazine of Artificial Intelligence in Finance, 1(3).
Game Theory
David McAllester and Deniz Yuret (2002)
Alpha-beta-conspiracy search. ICGA Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 16--35
Deniz Yuret (1994)
The principle of pressure in chess. In The Third Turkish Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks.

References Patrick Winston, Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Address: 545 Technology Square, NE43-816, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Telephone: 1-617-253-6754. Fax: 1-617-258-7413. Email: phw@ai.mit.edu.

Rodney Brooks, Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Address: 545 Technology Square, NE43-940, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Telephone: 1-617-253-5223. Fax: 1-617-253-0039. Email: brooks@ai.mit.edu.

Boris Katz, Principal Research Scientist, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Address: 545 Technology Square, NE43-824, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Telephone: 1-617-253-6032. Fax: 1-617-258-7413. Email: boris@ai.mit.edu.