Professor Ayşe BAŞAR

Dr. Ayşe Başar is the President of Kadir Has University and a professor in the Computer Engineering Department of Kadir Has University. She is an emeritus professor of Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU). She worked at TMU for 15 years as a professor and the director of the Data Science Laboratory (DSL) in the Faculty of Engineering. She was the Program Director of both Certificate Program in Data Analytics, Big Data, and Predictive Analytics, and the Master of Science Program in Data Science and Analytics at TMU. She also served as a department chair in Information Technology Management. She was a faculty research fellow of IBM Toronto Labs Centre for Advanced Studies, and affiliate research scientist in St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Before joining TMU, Professor Başar was a faculty member in the Computer Engineering Department at Boğaziçi University for 11 years. She held various administrative positions including department chair, vice-chair, summer school coordinator, dual degree programs campus coordinator. Her current research focus is to tackle the problem of decision-making under uncertainty by using Bayesian machine learning methods to analyze complex structures in data to build recommender systems and predictive models. Her work has advanced ML optimization and learning, with a focus on large language models (LLMs), Deep Reinforcement Learning, and ML explainability. She has an h-index of 45, and published more than 300 articles in journals and conferences. She is a member of AAAI, INFORMS, AIS, a senior member of IEEE. Prior to joining academia, Dr. Başar worked in various executive positions in the banking industry for 13 years managing advanced technology, technology and operations, corporate credit marketing, and financial control functions in multinational banks in Turkey and in the UK.