IDENTITY

RUSEN BIRBEN

AI & DATA ENGINEER
LOCANKARA, TR
STATUSAVAILABLE
DOB26/08/2002
LICB

AI & Data Engineering graduate from Istanbul Technical University, now a graduate researcher at METU's Applied NLP Group. Working on LLMs, agentic AI, and Turkish language technologies.

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01

EXPERIENCE

Graduate Researcher@METU Applied NLP Group ↗
04/2026 - Present
Ankara, TR

Lead METU NLP Connect, the lab's YouTube channel: expert interviews, educational explainers on LLMs and modern NLP, and recent-paper spotlights. Member of the Applied NLP Group (led by Asst. Prof. Çağrı Toraman), working on LLMs, generative AI, and Turkish language technologies.

Co-Founder@Fiction Studios ↗
08/2025 - 04/2026
Ankara, TR

Co-founded an AI startup at Bilkent Cyberpark, an accredited Turkish Teknokent. Built an LLM-powered guide app for museums and tourists. Wound down in 2026.

Junior AI Engineer@CyberQuote ↗
03/2025 - 07/2025
Istanbul, TR

Built AI automations and agentic LLM implementations for Phillip Capital subsidiary. Intelligent systems for operations and customer-facing platforms.

NLP Research Intern@ITU NLP Lab ↗
07/2024 - 08/2024
Istanbul, TR

Researched LLMs for financial applications: forecasting, sentiment analysis, tool usage, reasoning, and RAG implementations.

AIOps Research Intern@Havelsan ↗
08/2024 - 09/2024
Istanbul, TR

AIOps research using software log data for predictive maintenance. Generated demos on HDFS logs.

02

PROJECTS

Tobor

Amazon Warehouse Robot
2024 - 2025

Autonomous warehouse robot simulating Amazon logistics. Pathfinding, obstacle avoidance, task scheduling. Human/cargo detection with custom YOLO.

PythonROS2YOLORobotics
GHYT

Biting The Bytes

Turkish Diacritic Restoration
2024

T5-based transformer for restoring Turkish diacritics. Automatically adds accent marks and special characters for enhanced readability.

NLPT5TransformersTurkish
GHHF

AIZheimer

Machine Unlearning on SD
2024

Selectively removed concepts from Stable Diffusion 2.1 while preserving other capabilities. Content moderation and AI output customization.

Stable DiffusionUnlearningCV
GH

To-AI-or-Not-to-AI

GPT Detector
2023

Ensemble method to detect AI-generated text using three fine-tuned models. Addresses academic integrity and misinformation concerns.

NLPEnsembleClassification
GHHF

Anime Recommender

Collaborative Filtering
2022 - 2023

Personalized anime recommendations combining collaborative filtering and content-based approaches. RMSE: 0.289, MAE: 0.213.

RecSysMatrix Factorization
GH
03

EDUCATION

M.Sc. Computer Engineering (Thesis)

Middle East Technical University
2026 - Present

B.Sc. AI and Data Engineering

Istanbul Technical University
2022 - 2025GPA: 3.61 / 4.00

B.Sc. Electronics & Communication

Istanbul Technical University
2020 - 2022

Transferred to AI & Data Engineering

04

AWARDS

1416 YLSY Scholarship · M.Sc. & Ph.D.

Türkiye Ministry of National Education
May 2026

Türkiye's flagship state scholarship for graduate study abroad, established under Law No. 1416 (1929). Funds tuition, living stipend, travel, and exam fees for master's and doctoral programs in exchange for mandatory service at a Turkish university or public institution.

05

COURSES

Deep Learning Specialization ↗

Deeplearning.ai · Andrew Ng

Sequence Models, CNNs, NN and DL basics, Structuring ML Projects, Improving Deep NNs.

AWS Cloud Technical Essentials ↗

AWS · Coursera

Core AWS concepts, security practices, EC2, Lambda, ECS, RDS, DynamoDB, S3.

06

LANGUAGES

Turkish

Native

English

Fluent · TOEFL iBT 109

07

INTERESTS

Coffee

V60 - Aeropress - Moka Pot

Books

Philosophy - AI/CS - Finance

Anime & Manga

Watcher - Reader - Collector

Fitness

Lifting - Running - Calisthenics