Altan Cakir is a Lead Consultant in cloud solutions and big data analytics at Pangea.

Professor Cakir obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from Izmir Institute of Technology in 2006, following which he pursued graduate studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. During his Ph.D., he conducted scientific research focused on new physics searches using the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Subsequently, he served as a post-doctoral research fellow at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchotron (DESY), a national nuclear research center in Hamburg, Germany, for five years. He then assumed his current position as a full professor at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Istanbul, Turkey.

Currently, Dr. Cakir leads the ITU-CMS group at CERN and heads a data analysis group focused on the CMS detector. In addition, he was a visiting faculty member at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Illinois, USA, in 2017. His research group specializes in machine learning techniques applied to large-scale data analysis, with interdisciplinary expertise spanning science, detector development R&D, big data synthesis, economics, and industrial applications. Presently, he provides consultancy services to various global companies, sharing insights and expertise in big data applications, strategies, skills, and competencies based on real-world scenarios.

Professor Cakir delivers periodic international lectures in the Big Data and Business Analytics Program at Istanbul Technical University, covering topics such as Big Data Technologies and Applications and Machine Learning with Big Data. Moreover, he lectures at BigDat conferences, including many universities and institutes around the globe. He also serves as a member of ECFA (European Committee for Future Accelerators) and RECFA (Restricted European Committee for Future Accelerators) on behalf of Turkey within the scope of CERN associate membership.

Since 2019, Dr. Cakir has been a board member of the ITU Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Research and Applications Center and has served as co-president of the Turkish Artificial Intelligence Platform (www.ai.org.tr) since the beginning of 2021. Additionally, as of May 2021, he has been appointed as Dean of Research (ardek.itu.edu.tr) at Istanbul Technical University, responsible for planning and coordinating all research activities initiated at the university and in Turkey.

Education

Ph.D. in Physics

CERN, Germany

M.S. in Physics

Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey

B.S. in Physics

Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey