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). He subsequently served as a post-doctoral research fellow at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany, for five years, before assuming 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. 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.
Professor Cakir delivers periodic international lectures in the Big Data and Business Analytics Program at Istanbul Technical University, and lectures at BigDat conferences and universities around the globe. He serves as a member of ECFA (European Committee for Future Accelerators) and RECFA 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 since 2021. As of May 2021, he was appointed Dean of Research at Istanbul Technical University, responsible for planning and coordinating all research activities at the university and in Turkey.