Mustafa Ali Türker
M. Ali Türker has managed to lead a career in R&D and keep an educational lifework simultaneously since 1989. Having started his professional life in Electronics R&D Laboratories of TÜBÝTAK (The Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey) while he was an undergraduate student in Electrical & Electronics Department of METU (Middle East Technical University), he became a full-time engineer in the same institute upon graduation in 1991. He took part in the establishment of a signal processing laboratory and led active research in video and image processing through his Master’s work until 1994, also from METU. His Master’s thesis on video compression included many novelties that he presented in international conferences and the thesis report with extensive survey work and a bibliography of nearly 2000 papers is still used as course material.
In 1995 he was employed by NRC (Nokia Research Centre) in Tampere, Finland where he took part in a project team who developed a patented video coder for mobile visual communications. Two of the granted US patents on this coder bears his name. Through this project he has contributed to MPEG-4 video coding and ITU H26x international standards. During his occupation in NRC he completed the coursework necessary to attain a Licentiate degree from Tampere Technical University. In his last year at NRC he started to work on set-top-boxes that provide both digital TV programming and internet access. In this period his research interests have diversified to include IP networking and digital media systems.
He returned to Turkey in 1999 to work as a technical consultant for Garanti Technology which is the IT centre of the largest private bank in Turkey. In this organization he pursued projects on almost all topics in information and communication technologies (ICT). Consequently, he joined SEBIT Educational and Information Tecnologies in 2003 to technically coordinate the iClass integrated project of the FP6, which he successfully did until today. He has been a columnist at nation’s largest IT magazine in print since 2003 and he lectures a course on “Natural Intelligence” at the Informatics Institute of METU since 4 years which covers topics such as Complex Adaptive Systems, Self-organization, Semiotics, Visual Languages, Man-Machine Symbiosis Intelligence, Information and Decision Theories and Evolutionary Computation. He (co)authored 43 articles that appeared in national and international publications and holds an International Project Management Professional (PMP) certificate.
