Into the “Parallel” World

Hello everyone, my name is Aslıhan, I am 26 years old and live in Istanbul, Turkey. I graduated in Applied Mathematics from Yildiz Technical University. Currently, I continue my master’s in Computational Science And Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. This spring term was my first term on my master and I believe the Summer of HPC program is a really great opportunity for both master’s classes and the future career that I want to pursue.

With the classes I had during my senior year in university, a plan and work area that I want to pursue have shaped in my mind and as the magic world of data has been fascinating me and pulling me inside, I was very determined to continue to work on machine learning. My thesis subject was “Passenger demand forecasting with data mining methods in the aviation industry”.

I worked in 3 startups after I graduated from university in Machine Learning Engineer and Data Scientist roles. During these 3 years, I had a chance to work on great big data projects on predictive models such as time series prediction and customer segmentations. But over the past year, I wanted to shape my career with more scientific ways and do some research on what really fascinates and thrills me that actually my current master’s program covers.

After I got an email from my professor about this program, I was so excited and thought that I definitely need to participate and I am sure it would strongly enrich my future studies and help me in my career. Moreover, I consider this program to be a great opportunity to get to know how to solve more complex scientific and engineering systems and problems. I am always very curious about the different approaches to engineering problems.

I will be working on project 2105 “Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning For Biomedical Texts” and I feel super excited and happy to be selected from this project and also to be able to have a chance to contribute to this project. It is a really great opportunity for me to be able to learn more about text mining and the mBERT model for multilingual classification model in NLP. At the end of this summer, I am going to learn a lot of things as I have already learned lots of key components about scalable parallel programming. Being able to work with such amazing mentors and my fellow teammate Lazaros Zervos I will be working with is a privilege, it will be such an amazing summer both experiencing the project and meeting new people as well!

To be mention myself a bit more, I describe myself as quite an active and competitive person when it comes to doing sports. I used to play volleyball for about 10 years and then continue with swimming as a hobby. But apparently, I took my hobby very seriously as I intended to “Bosphorus Cross-Continental Swimming Race” over the past year before Corona and I made a huge effort to complete 800m under 20 minutes but I might need to start over again for my goal. I also want to mention another hobby of mine, actually more than a hobby, sometimes I call it my desperate addiction as well which is Puzzles!

I am looking forward to starting the project, get to know more about and dive deep into it, Let the PRACE SoHPC 2021 begin! I wish all of the participants the best of luck!