Ata Turk

About me

I am an applied computer scientist and cloud architect with a PhD in cloud systems and experience in building systems and solving deep technical challenges. I work on the design/development of scalable cloud-based platforms and improving the performance, security, or efficiency of distributed frameworks. I enjoy the privilege of working with a worldwide team of researchers and developers while building and delivering public (Mass Open Cloud) and private (State Street) cloud infrastructures using agile methodologies and DevOps practices. I co-teach a graduate level cloud computing course at Boston University that provides an understanding of key cloud computing and big data concepts and teaches agile development. I also have extensive expertise in designing algorithms for graph analytics. My academic works in systems and combinatorics have been published in prestigious journals and conferences such as Usenix FAST, TCC, IC2E, SoCC, BigData, TKDE, TPDS, WWW, SIGIR, ICDM.

My google scholar page, my cv.

Positions held

VP of Cloud Architecture and Infra @ State Street (2018 -- )

I am an architect and engineer developing core IT infrastructure solutions for State Street and leading various teams that are (i) developing the observability and alerting solutions for our enterprise, (ii) engineering the on-prem object store service, (iii) engineering the infra for the enterprise API management solution, and (iv) engineering the on-prem ML as a service and MLOPS solution.

Senior Research Scientist @ Mass Open Cloud (MOC), Boston (2014 -- 2018)

I was leading the monitoring, bigdata and cloud healthcare efforts in MOC.

Postdoc @ Yahoo Labs, Barcelona (2013 -- 2014)

I was a postdoc at the Web Retrieval Team of Yahoo Labs, Barcelona, mainly working on user profile generation, entity suggestion, and ad CTR prediction.

Company founder and partner @ Bor Software Inc. (2007 -- 2010)

I was among the five founding partners of Bor Soft of Turkey. I worked as a managing partner between 2007 and 2010 within various projects including Web 2.0, mobile app., GIS systems, and content management systems development. I cashed out in 2010 to finish my PhD.

PhD from Computer Engineering Dept. of Bilkent University (2012)

Thesis title: Utilizing Query Logs for Data Replication and Placement in Big Data Applications

Recent selected publications

• M. Abdi, A. Mosayyebzadeh, M.H. Hajkazemi, E.U. Kaynar, A. Turk, L. Rudolph ..., A Community Cache with Complete Information, in USENIX FAST'2021.
• A. Mohan, S. Nadgowda, B. Pipaliya, S. Varma, S. Suneja, C. Isci, G. Cooperman, P. Desnoyers, O. Krieger, A. Turk, “Towards Non-Intrusive Software Introspection and Beyond“, in IEEE IC2E’2020.
• A. Byrne, E. Ates, A. Turk, V. Pchelin, S. S. Duri, S. Nadgowda, C. Isci, A. Coskun, “Praxi: Cloud Software Discovery That Learns From Practice“, in IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 2020.
• E. U. Kaynar, M. Abdi, M. H. Hajkazemi, A. Turk, R. R. Sambasivan, D. Cohen, L. Rudolph, P. Desnoyers, O. Krieger, “D3N: A multi-layer cache for the rest of us“, in IEEE BigData’2019.
• A. Turk, D. Turkoglu, “Revisiting Wedge Sampling for Triangle Counting“, in WWW’2019.
• A. Mohan, A. Turk, R. S. Gudimetla, S. Tikale, J. Hennesey, U. Kaynar, G. Cooperman, P. Desnoyers, and O. Krieger, “M2: Malleable Metal as a Service”, in IEEE IC2E, 2017.
• D. Turkoglu, A. Turk, Edge-Based Wedge Sampling to Estimate Triangle Counts in Very Large Graphs, in IEEE ICDM, 2017. (Best paper runner up)
• O. Tuncer, E. Ates, Y. Zhang, A. Turk, J. Brandt, V. J. Leung, M. Egele, and A. K. Coskun, Diagnosing Performance Variations in HPC Applications Using Machine Learning, in ISC HPC, 2017. Gauss Award Winner
• R. Pienaar, A. Turk, J. Bernal-Rusiel, N. Rannou, D. Haehn, P. E. Grant and O. Krieger, CHIPS – A Service for Collecting, Organizing, Processing, and Sharing Medical Image Data in the Cloud, in VLDB DMAH, 2017.
• A. Turk, H. Chen, A. Byrne, J. Knollmeyer, S. Duri, C. Isci, and A. K. Coskun “DeltaSherlock: Identifying Changes in the Cloud”, in IEEE BigData, 2016.
• J. Hennessey, S. Tikale, A. Turk, E. Kaynar, C. Hill, P. Desnoyers, O. Krieger, “HIL: Designing an Exokernel for the Data Center”, in SoCC, 2016.
• G. B. Tran, A. Turk, B. B. Cambazoglu, “A Random Walk Model for Optimization of Search Impact in Web Frontier Ranking”, in SIGIR, 2015.
• M. Zapater, A. Turk, J. M. Moya, J. L. Ayala, A. K. Coskun, “Dynamic Workload and Cooling Management in High-Efficiency Data Centers”, in IGSC, 2015.
• A. Turk, O. R. Selvitopi, C. Aykanat, H. Ferhatosmanoglu, “Temporal Workload-Aware Replicated Partitioning for Social Networks”. IEEE TKDE, 2014.
• A. Turk, K. Y. Oktay, C. Aykanat, “Query-Log Aware Replicated Declustering”, IEEE TPDS, 2012.
• O. R. Selvitopi, A. Turk, C. Aykanat, “Replicated Partitioning for Undirected Hypergraphs”, JPDC, 2012.