In Memoriam: Jorge Quiané-Ruiz

Note: On March 26 during EDBT 2024, we had a memorial event for our colleague Jorge, whom we lost suddenly in May last year. I gave a speech similar to the one below at that event.

 

Jorge joined our research group at ITU in January 2023 as an associate professor together with his wife Zoi, and we had the privilege of having him as a colleague for five months.

I knew Jorge’s brilliance through his work, but I didn’t have a chance to collaborate with him or get to know him as much as many of you did. I don’t have fun stories or memories of a research collaboration to share.

Yet, in the brief time I got to know him, he made a lasting impact on my life personally, and I want to talk about that. What I have is a bit dark, and I practiced this speech many times to make sure I don’t cry but it may happen, so just heads up.

 

Last year, Jorge’s loss wasn’t the only loss I experienced. In a period of four months, I lost a grandmother, an uncle, and an aunt.

The morning my uncle died, I received the news from my dad on the phone. My uncle’s death wasn’t sudden, unlike Jorge’s. He had cancer. I had been waiting for that call for a while. In fact, as soon as I saw my dad calling, I knew what the news was.

I cried a bit after ending the call with my dad. I had a lecture in a couple of hours. I went to work. I was also supposed to have a guest lecture at the Introduction to Database Systems course co-taught by Eleni and Jorge that semester the day after. It was kind of a tradition that I gave a guest lecture on “intro to modern hardware” in that course. But given the death of my uncle I wanted to go to Turkey to be with the family. So, I had to tell Jorge and Eleni that I wouldn’t be able to give the guest lecture anymore. We already had a plan b for this scenario since they knew of my uncle’s situation. In fact, the week before, Jorge one day came to my office and told me that I shouldn’t worry about the lecture given my situation, and we could just play the video of the lecture I had given the year before. I told him let’s keep the video option as backup still.

After I arrived at work that morning, I went to check Jorge’s office. He was there. As I was delivering the news to him, I started crying again. After I calmed down a bit, he said “I don’t know your family, but I feel your pain. Can I give you a hug?”

Death news is hard to react to in any context, but especially in a work environment. We are supposed to be professional and not “too emotional” at least with most of the people we work with if not all. Last year, as I had gone through the losses, I received reactions from colleagues ranging from “OK. Jesus. I will leave you alone then.” to “How can I help?” And I appreciate any gesture or reaction that acknowledges the difficulty of the situation.

Jorge was my first in-person human contact that morning after hearing the news of my uncle. The words and the hug he offered were so simple yet full of empathy and generosity and exactly what I needed to gather the strength to go through the tasks of the day like buy tickets to Istanbul, email people that you won’t be around for some days, go to your lecture … I will always be grateful to him for the support he gave me that morning. I am really sorry that we lost him so young, and I wish I had had him as a colleague way longer.

Yet I still feel lucky and privileged because I have Zoi as a colleague, and I cherish her presence and professional feedback at work. Observing her strength throughout all this has been an inspiration. I look forward to working with her for many more years.

Titane

  

Warning: This blog post contains spoilers about the 2021 horror film Titane. If you would like to avoid the spoilers or don’t like horror, I recommend an older post, “In Defense of Sleeping Beauty and All the Others”, which was spiritually an International Women’s Day post like this one, even though it was posted at a different month.

 

There are two movie genres that tend to get the most resistance or the least love from the people I interact with: horror and musicals.

Drama and comedy are the vanilla genres accepted by everyone. Action and western are pastimes. Science fiction and documentaries make people feel their time is spent productively. …

On the other hand, many people deem horror disturbing and musicals annoying.

 

I love all movie genres. But I am specifically a sucker for horror and musicals. Both are like emotion-fireworks. Unlike my sentiments about real fireworks, which I think should be banned, any art that depicts emotion-fireworks is helpful to deal with emotions that we aren’t allowed or welcomed to deal with publicly. Such art can be a life-vest while swimming through those emotions preventing you from being drowned in them.

 

I watched Titane (on IMDB, categorized as drama, horror, and sci-fi) together with Sister in Movies the week it hit the theaters in Copenhagen in Fall 2021 at Gloria Biograf. I was going through a difficult period at work and had a lot of anger, frustration, and sadness. I was supported very well by family and friends at the time, but some emotions were hard to express outwardly. Titane threw me a life-vest.

Regardless of my specific situation at that time, Titane also serves as a life-vest for the anxiety and anger I have internalized as a woman who goes through life in this world. Today, I count Titane as one of my favorite movies.

 

In Titane, Alexia is our main protagonist. In the remainder of this post, I will go over some events she endures each having a horror element of different intensity. The interpretation of these events is based on what they triggered in my mind during my viewing of the film. The intention of the filmmaker Julia Ducournau might be very different.

 

Hair being a source of pain.

Alexia’s hair gets stuck in another character’s piercing causing pain for both Alexia and the other character.

Let’s first take this one literally. I don’t know how many times my own hair got stuck in things causing me physical pain, yet I always prefer to keep it long and untied increasing the changes of it getting stuck at places.

Moving onto less literal avenues … How we present our hair to the world, whether we choose or are forced to cover (or uncover) it or put it and other body hair through various beauty regimes, can also be a source of pain.

 

Blood coming out of your body.

Alexia finds motor oil, not blood, because this film is also sci-fi, coming out of her vagina one morning while still in bed.

Vaginal bleeding is a normal part of a woman’s life during menstruation. However, even under those normal and expected circumstances, many things associated with menstruation can be sources of anxiety: pain, irregularity, PMS, drowsiness, a heavy flow causing you having to clean blood off things you wore or slept on ...

 

Unwanted or unplanned pregnancy.

Alexia finds out she is pregnant. This wasn’t her intention. Her first reaction is to take it in her hands to terminate the pregnancy. It doesn’t work. She has to keep the baby.

I have never planned to have a baby, but I had to do a pregnancy test once. The days surrounding it were among the loneliest of my life. I was too young to be a mother (“too young” can change person to person). Luckily, the test result was negative, and I got my period a few days later (three weeks late). There was one thing that kept me calm for the case where the result wasn’t negative: I lived in a country (Turkey at the time) where abortion was (and still is) legal.

We live in the year 2024. Women’s autonomy on their own body is still a luxury and not a human right and is still heavily exploited by (mostly male) politicians.

 

Being followed by a stranger, or unwanted attention in general.

One day, as she is leaving work, Alexia is followed by a man. He doesn’t leave her even if she rejects his advances. Another day, Alexia listens to a girl being verbally harassed on a bus by a group of boys.

Unlike the single pregnancy test example, I unfortunately have several examples for this one. The guy who didn’t leave my dorm-room door even though I repeatedly told him to leave, an uncomfortable interaction with a colleague back when I was a PhD student, the stranger who started hitting on me on San Jose light rail and followed me even after I rejected his advances and got off the light rail … Too many people feeling entitled over your body.

 

Hiding your identity to be accepted.

A large chunk of the movie, we watch Alexia hide the fact that she is a woman, to feel safe and be accepted among a group of men. As the movie progresses, the toll this lie takes on her body increases. 

When I started my PhD, I was in a lab where I was the only female. Terms like diversity & inclusion or psychological safety weren’t a thing back then. I thought to be part of the lab I had to be “one of the boys”. The reason was a combination of the environment and my lack of self-confidence. I assume most woman who has career ambitions, not just in computer science, can relate to this at some point.

I wasn’t one of the boys, and I was never going to be. As a solution, I hid myself behind layers of armor and revealed very little. It didn’t work. I was let go of that lab. I eventually ended up in a lab where I could reveal more of myself. But at work events such as conferences I still thought I needed some armor and put the layers back on just in case to keep myself safer. It was a false sense of safety. Instead, I got unhappy for having to hide myself. I spent years after my PhD getting rid of the armor.

Today, I am the coordinator of a lab that has 5 female faculty members. Things have improved in our field even though the pace of progress is way slower than I wish it to be. I rarely feel the need for armor now even at work events, but I am unsure whether this is a result of progress or me being in a position of relative power as an associate professor instead of a PhD student. Likely both.

 

Death by childbirth.

Alexia dies while giving birth to her baby.

A mother dying during childbirth could be a metaphor for other things such as being reborn or letting go of the life you had before the baby. On the other hand, according to WHO, in 2020, 800 women died on average each day due to causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In the older centuries, these rates were way higher, and if you wanted a long life as a woman, you were better off becoming a nun.

 

Happy International Women’s Day everyone!

 

First Sabbatical

My offices during the sabbatical. I had an office to myself at HPI (left); I shared an office with Matthias’ PhD students Arnab and Sebastian, who used to be my MSc thesis student, at TU Berlin (middle – photo credit goes to Sebastian here); at CWI, I was squatting in Hannes’ office (right). Sorry for the low image quality on the blogger platform.

Previous semester (August 2023 – December 2023) I was on sabbatical. This means that I had no teaching and (almost no) administrative duties at the university.

This is a practical and personal, not a technical, account of my sabbatical written for the general audience. If you are interested in what I did scientifically during my sabbatical, there is a bit of it here, but not much. I am happy to talk about that separately, and I hope at least a subset of those works will get published eventually.   

 

At ITU, in theory, you can take a one-semester sabbatical after 6 consecutive semesters of teaching or one-year sabbatical after 6 consecutive years of teaching.

Late 2020 (almost three years after I joined ITU), I acquired my first research grant from Independent Research Fund Denmark. It was a combination of a starting grant, Sapere Aude, and a grant targeting junior female faculty, Inge Lehmann[1]. In my Inge Lehmann application, I put some budget for doing research visits abroad since one of the things the call emphasized was the personal development of the applicant.

As an academic, the idea of “doing a sabbatical eventually” was of course in my mind, but I thought it would happen sometime in the not-so-near future. At the time I acquired the grant, I was still relatively new at ITU, this would be the first time I would get to hire my own PhD students. Also, I still had a temporary residence permit and didn’t want to complicate my residence rights in Denmark by leaving the country for a longer duration with a non-EU passport.

Thus[2], I wasn’t the one who asked for my sabbatical, it was my department head Peter Sestoft. During our yearly one-on-one in 2021, he suggested that a one-semester sabbatical would be a good use of my travel money from Inge Lehmann grant. His suggestion made sense to me as well. So, it was decided.

Due to the teaching needs at the university and my own need to first form my own group with the acquired grants, the sabbatical was scheduled for Fall 2023.

 

I have seen people doing different kinds of sabbaticals. The more traditional kind is when the person goes to either another academic institution or a company to spark new ideas, start new collaborations ... On the other hand, some stay where they are and spend more time doing research with the absence of teaching and administrative duties, some use the time to write a book or found a startup, some just rest, some utilize it as an extended paternity leave, and some do a combination of all these things. All are legitimate options in my opinion. The choice should be up to what makes sense for you at that point in your career and life.

In addition to the obvious goals like exchange ideas and start new collaborations, I aimed at the following during my sabbatical: (1) minimize bureaucracy à no new residence permits or visas – you have dealt with enough of those in the last decade, (2) get to know different research groups better à visit different places on the way, (3) introduce your team’s work to other people à give as many talks as possible, and (4) remember that you don’t function well in not-crowded cities and your mental health is more important à prioritize work, but if you can, pick bigger cities for longer stays.

In turn, I decided to do a very mobile sabbatical. I would first stay in Berlin for ~2.5 months splitting my time between Data Engineering Systems group at Hasso-Plattner Institute, hosted by Tilmann Rabl, and DAMS lab at TU Berlin, hosted by Matthias Böhm. Then, I would have a 2-week stay in Amsterdam at the Database Architectures group at CWI, hosted by Peter Boncz. Finally, I would tour Switzerland for 2 weeks giving talks at University of Fribourg (host: Alberto Lerner), EPFL (host: my academic mother), and ETH (host: Ana Klimovic).

While in Germany and The Netherlands, I also took the time to give talks at other places either using my own connections (Volker Markl at TU Berlin, Zsolt István and Carsten Binnig at TU Darmstadt, Martin Hentschel at Snowflake-Berlin, Sebastian Schelter at University of Amsterdam, and at TU Munich for the occasion of Lukas Vogel’s PhD defense) or with the help of my hosts (Matthias invited me to the BIFOLD Summer School, Tilmann helped me to get invited to the HPI Retreat, and Peter put me in contact with Databricks in Amsterdam). The full talk itinerary and the talk itself can be found here.

 

While this plan satisfied all my goals, nothing in life comes without trade-offs. The main drawback of doing such a mobile sabbatical is that it becomes more challenging to focus on one project where you can progress faster and dig deeper. Furthermore, visiting several places in such a short time while other work duties go on in the background can be exhausting both physically and mentally. Some days, I felt very tired or couldn’t sleep well because too much was going on in my head. On such days, I questioned my choice of splitting my limited time across many places. In the end, I don’t regret the sabbatical plan I had, but I would like to be honest about this trade-off.

 

Some people assume that sabbatical means you are completely off your regular job and other work duties, and for some this may indeed be the case, but not for everyone. At least, I had to do other work simultaneously with all these visits.

First, I kept talking to my students regularly online during my sabbatical. For me this is important, especially since the PhD duration is only 3 years in Denmark, and I don’t regret these meetings.

Second, even though I was off teaching and administrative duties for the fall semester, I still had to deal with the administrative stuff related to my course in the spring semester in addition to paying attention to the open faculty call for our group at ITU. While this wasn’t a lot of work and I didn’t mind doing it, it does cause some interruptions.

Finally, I had a lot of academic service work. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have taken on that much. I still struggle with finding the right balance with respect to academic service. I enjoy doing this type of work and find it fulfilling and educational; the amount tends to be the issue, not the work itself.

As a result, during my first month in Berlin, I was working six days a week and could take only Sundays off, and my email load wasn’t less than what it is during a regular semester.

 

Let’s talk about the individual visits now; first, focusing on the work, then, on practical matters (e.g., insurance, accommodation) and overall wellbeing. 

Berlin

I worked with Tilmann and Matthias before on different occasions. I knew that they would be open to collaborating with me and there could be synergies across the research that we do. Given the shorter-visits nature of my sabbatical, it made sense to reach out to them first (late 2022) to kickstart new collaborations/projects more smoothly.

The way we approached the collaboration was different at the two places.

Tilmann gave me time to talk to his students the first couple of weeks of my stay in Berlin. Then, I told him the project I find the most relevant given my research background and interests, and we started collaborating on that one. I have more of a secondary supervisor role in this collaboration. Marcel Weisgut, one of Tilmann’s PhD students, drives the work. The project is on analyzing different cache-coherent interconnects and allows me to get back to my transaction processing roots, which I really enjoy.

With Matthias, I tried something riskier. I haven’t been coding properly since I left IBM. I told him that I would be open to getting back to coding. But it had to be in c or cpp (so no SystemDS for me). We discussed different project visions he had, and I picked one. In this setting, Matthias has been like my advisor, and he is a really nice one. (Not sure if I have been a good student, though.) I am also involved in one of the BSc thesis projects he has. Both topics here are out of my comfort zone as they are more into the inner workings of machine learning. I work on machine learning systems now, but my focus is more on the systems and hardware side. I have been learning the machine learning internals very slowly and only at a necessary level in the process. As for coding, I really enjoyed getting back to it, but given everything else I was doing in parallel, I could only focus on it one day a week when I was in Berlin, so the progress has been slow.

Tilmann, Matthias, and I also discussed ideas for a joint project that we can kickstart in the near future. This may or may not materialize, but I am optimistic and excited.

 

Amsterdam

In contrast to my history with my Berlin hosts, I have never had a chance to work with anyone from CWI[3]. I have learned a lot from the work done by the Database Architectures group at CWI, especially early in my PhD when I was trying to understand database systems. They knew me from conferences. For the remaining part of my sabbatical, I wanted to visit them to get to know the group and the place better and see if there could be avenues for collaboration in the future. So, I reached out to Peter (during SIGMOD in June 2023), and he was very welcoming.

I was aware that I wouldn’t have so much time for this visit. After Berlin, I had roughly a month left in my sabbatical before Christmas holidays. I knew I had to put Switzerland on my path as well, but we will get to that later. Thus, I could only have about two weeks for the CWI visit.

Two weeks is too short to start anything from scratch. In addition, at that point in my sabbatical, my head was quite tired due to splitting across different projects and locations. I unfortunately didn’t have the headspace and energy to jump into something brand new while I was still in Amsterdam.

Instead, I decided to use my time to develop a few project ideas I had that involves using DuckDB; related to emerging SSD technology, resource management on resource-constrained devices, and data management support for our experiment tracking platform radT. I had very helpful discussions with Peter, Hannes and Mark at DuckDB labs, and Till from MotherDuck on these ideas. With the start of 2024, I managed to take the baby steps on a couple of these projects, we will see how things evolve.

 

Switzerland

I did my PhD in Switzerland. People have been inviting me to Switzerland since I moved back to Europe. While there are a lot of people whom I consider to be family in Switzerland, I tend to avoid visiting the place and prefer catching up with the people at conferences elsewhere instead. My complicated relationship with Switzerland surfaces here and there in this blog, most recently in this post. I won’t delve into it further here. During my sabbatical, it made sense to stop the avoidance and carve time to visit Switzerland.

I allocated two weeks for this visit as well, but this time I didn’t want to stay at one location.

I collaborated with Alberto Lerner from eXascale InfoLab at University of Fribourg, and several others, recently that led to a CIDR 2023 paper. Alberto asked me to visit them many times before. So, I reached out to him to make that happen finally. By the end of my visit, he almost convinced me to go there for my next sabbatical to learn FPGA programming.

Then, the roots of my academic family are at EPFL. So, I reached out to my academic mother and Dimitra to visit EPFL. They kindly aligned the DIAS end-of-year raclette party with my visit. That party is one of the things I miss from my PhD years, so I really appreciated this. It was a lovely reunion.

Finally, two of my PhD students (Ties Robroek and Ehsan Yousefzadeh-Asl-Miandoab) did their research stay abroad (a mandatory part of PhD at ITU) at ETH (hosted by Ana Klimovic) and University of Basel (hosted by Florina Ciorba), respectively. While we unfortunately couldn’t find a suitable date with Florina, we were able to arrange a visit with Ana. It was my first time visiting the systems group at ETH. I especially loved exchanging info and experiences with everyone there working on a variety of systems topics.

During this leg of the sabbatical, I also had the chance to see many people that I haven’t seen in such a long time from academic family to family friends, and I am grateful to my academic sister Danica Porobic for being my unofficial host in Switzerland.

 

All the interactions I had during these visits were worthwhile on their own even if in the end nothing comes out of the projects I got involved in or made plans for during this sabbatical. I am very grateful to my hosts, all the PhD students, and other team members for taking the time to talk to me.

 

Practical stuff

Accommodation. Most of my travel and accommodation expenses during the sabbatical were covered by my own funding. However, my hosts also helped. Tilmann asked HPI to cover my train tickets to/from Berlin and gave me really good tips for accommodation, which helped me to find a very good option with a reasonable price in Berlin (I booked six months in advance). Peter helped me to get a room at CWI guesthouse, which reduced my costs substantially in Amsterdam. In general, it is good to reach out to people early on and ask them for tips for these practical matters.

Thanks to my funding, I was also able to keep my apartment in Copenhagen as is and was back in Copenhagen a couple of times in between visits. It was nice to be back home for a bit.

Visas. Since I on purpose arranged my sabbatical in a way that avoids visa applications, I didn’t have to worry about this, but acting early would also be important on this matter. On the other hand, keeping my stays relatively short at different places was partially motivated by this goal. With my Danish resident card, I am safe traveling up to 90 days abroad in Schengen region, but not more. Technically, no one checks or stamps your passport when you are within the Schengen region, but this isn’t something I would abuse, especially carrying the kind of passport I carry.

Health insurance. The health insurance I have thanks to my job becomes invalid for sabbaticals since work trips that are longer than 28 days are no longer covered. If you are an EU citizen, you may still be covered through your Blue Card, but I am not entirely sure, since I am not eligible for this card as a non-EU citizen in Denmark, so I didn’t investigate it further. Therefore, I had to find another solution for my health insurance.

Following up on the suggestions of a few colleagues, I decided to check if I can get a Mastercard Gold, which provides health and travel insurance for trips up to some length in Europe, which fit well for my sabbatical case. And since my Danish bank likes me (the feeling isn’t mutual), they agreed to give me a Mastercard Gold for a cheap price. Now, I have three cards: one parliament blue, one smoky gray, and one gold. I wish I had pink, red, and purple instead.

Luckily, I didn’t have to use the gold card for health insurance purposes, but it was the only option I had while paying for the long-term accommodation bill in Berlin. The limits of my other two cards weren’t high enough.

Carrying my stuff. I had to buy two new carry-on-size suitcases. I won’t go into further details on this one unless you ask for it, but in general I spent more time than I expected (and wanted) thinking about suitcases and how to pack them.

Communication. I didn’t have communication issues except for the French-speaking part of Switzerland. I got around in Germany easily with the combination of my English, highly deteriorated German, and native Turkish. In Amsterdam, English was enough, but I made attempts at parsing written Dutch using all the languages I know. In Lausanne, I was impressed by my ability to still remember how to order food in French. It was out of necessity as I didn’t have the option to order things in English. In Fribourg, asking for directions at the university building in English got me nowhere, and I texted Alberto.

Other expenses. I never thought I would say this, but Copenhagen is cheap. I knew it would be cheaper than Switzerland. But it is also cheaper than Berlin, at least in terms of my usual university-lunch-plate and grocery shopping. I didn’t stay in Amsterdam long enough to judge this well, but it felt similar to Copenhagen in terms of such costs.

 

Wellbeing

During my first week in Berlin, one concern a couple of my friends had for me was whether I would feel lonely and down. Their concerns were valid since I have a track record of being slightly depressed whenever I move to a new country till I get used to the place (or in the case of Switzerland, the whole duration). The sabbatical was a substantially different experience, though. I have neither felt lonely nor depressed at any point. I would attribute this mainly to two factors: the social nature of my sabbatical and me being older.

First, my hosts, Tilmann, Matthias, and Peter, were all extremely supportive and inclusive, and their groups immediately adopted me as one of their own. There were also a lot of work-social activities of the good kind, not the draining kind.

The rest of the time, I was going around visiting different places and giving talks. In a way, I didn’t have time to be “down”. I had overall constructive interactions and discussions with people during these visits. There was only one instance where I felt slightly like shit after my talk because of certain attitudes both during and after the talk, but other times were all energizing experiences.

Second, I have known myself for almost 36 years now, and with that knowledge I can better prevent or damage-control negative experiences. My sabbatical goals #1 and #4, as listed above, were there because I was trying to avoid certain things that tend to pull me down. Following those goals, I didn’t need another Western-world approval for my existence at the places I was visiting, and both Berlin and Amsterdam are great cities to be in for longer durations for me. In Berlin, my body felt like she was in her natural habitat. In Amsterdam, I had the same feeling I had when I visited Copenhagen for the first time (for my ITU job interview), which I will call peaceful excitement.

 

On the other hand, my rent-like period got a bit off during my sabbatical and I had trouble sleeping on some nights, especially toward the end. Considering my intense and mobile schedule, this was expected, I guess.

 

Ending with the most important point. When I announced my sabbatical, a friend joked “Is this an excuse to watch Gilmore Girls again?”

I have a tradition of watching Gilmore Girls every time I move to a new place, which means that I watched the whole series 5 times and watched parts of it even more times as I introduced it to other friends. The logic behind this tradition is at a new place, in the beginning, one must deal with a lot of instability without having much to rely on. A show like Gilmore Girls gives me the feeling of stability amid the chaos.

My sabbatical stays were somewhat eligible to put my Gilmore Girls tradition into action. However, shortly before my sabbatical, I started rewatching Gilmore Girls with my dear colleague Veronika Cheplygina. During my sabbatical, it made sense to pause it and resume with her when I get back. Since I believe in flexible traditions, keep the core and adjust the content if you need to, I instead went further back in the nostalgia lane and started to rewatch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Still watching it and currently at season 6.

 

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[1] Back when I applied, Inge Lehmann was a new call, and you had to apply together with the starting grant. The year after, they separated these two grant applications, which was a good decision as it gives more options to junior researchers.

[2] I cannot use the word “thus” without thinking of Saltburn anymore.

[3] I worked with Erietta Liarou, who did her PhD at CWI, but I don’t think this counts, since she was a postdoc at EPFL and no longer at CWI when we collaborated. Also, an unrelated note, people used to mix-up Erietta and I at conferences a lot. 

Emergency Room

In recent years, I haven’t been able to spend that much alone time with my parents during my visits to Turkey, since we tend to have other family staying with us during holiday seasons. There is a reason why every couch and sofa my parents have at home can become a bed. I adopted this couch habit at each place I lived.

I love our visitors; they are people I miss and would like to see as well. Some of them come to us mainly to see me. Some of them live abroad like I do, so they come to see us. However, I have also lived away from my parents since I was 17 and I have no siblings. The time I visit my parents is crucial to us as I don’t see them often and we are each other’s core family.

Thus, I asked my parents to come to Copenhagen last year for the New Year’s instead of me going to Istanbul, and they welcomed the idea of spending time just us three. During their visit, my grandmother passed away[i]. We flew to Istanbul the next day altogether. That visit to Istanbul for her funeral was the last time I saw my uncle, one of my mom’s brothers, who also passed away earlier this year[ii]. Furthermore, we lost my aunt[ii], my dad’s sister, who lived in Chicago and usually visited us during summer holidays.

In darker parts of my grief earlier this year, I felt like a selfish asshole for wishing to have only my parents for the holidays. It is as if in return for that wish, I lost three close family members. Logically, I know the losses had nothing to do with my wish. I didn’t wish people dead, I just wanted more time with my parents.

 

This year, for the end of year holidays, we again have a fuller house with other family members visiting. I am excited to see all these people, especially after this year’s losses. However, as usual, that excitement comes with the trade-off of my time with my mom and dad.

I arrived in Istanbul the evening of December 22^nd. My parents welcomed me at the airport together with a family member who flew in from Izmir earlier that day. My dad drove us home. My aunt, my mom’s sister, was there waiting for us. We all had dinner. We would have more family coming in a few days.

My mom recently had surgery because they found skin cancer in her nose. It was benign, but it was better to remove it. Shortly after dinner, my mom went to the bathroom to renew the bandage on her nose and my dad went to help her. I was on my laptop writing while others watched TV. At some point, I heard my mom asking my dad if he is ok. I went there to check. My dad wasn’t ok. He was feeling dizzy and the color on his face was fading. Shortly after, he couldn’t stand without us supporting him, and he started mumbling. We called an ambulance.

My dad had a heart attack once back when I lived in the US. It was a mild one. He didn’t even notice it, he thought he was having a rough day. In other words, he had the best heart attack one could have, if such a thing exists. They noticed the traces of a prior heart attack during a checkup, which my mom forced him to go to, later that year.

By the time the ambulance came, my dad was in better shape. But given his prior history with heart issues, they decided to take him to hospital to keep him under observation for a while to make sure there is nothing heart related. I went with him. They told me that I couldn’t stay at the back of the ambulance, since it was illegal, and I should ask the driver if he would be willing to have me in the front. It was my first time in an ambulance. I felt very uneasy leaving my dad at that moment, but I knew they had to do their job. The driver allowed me in the front. He played some games on his phone as I waited anxiously while they did some initial tests on my dad. At some point, they opened the small window between the front and the back of the ambulance to tell the driver it was time to move. I could then hear my dad answering some questions in his normal voice, which calmed me down.

When we reached the hospital, I first had to deal with some paperwork before joining my dad in one of the emergency rooms. We talked about what stresses him out these days, did some gossiping, discussed world politics as the hospital staff came in and out asking us questions, getting more blood from my dad, and performing additional checks. At some point, my dad said “This way we got to spend some alone time. We were worried that we would get none during your visit. You can write about this in your blog.” It was true. It was one of the rare times I spent alone with my dad in years. I really don’t wish to repeat this, though.

After a while, I told him to try to get some sleep. Even though there were still interruptions for test results and more blood checks, he did get some naps. Eventually, they let us go. My mom’s older brother drove us back. There wasn’t anything heart related to worry about in the end. It was likely a low blood pressure issue, and he has also been overwhelmed lately for various reasons.

 

I used to have a dedicated day each with my mom and dad whenever I visited them on holidays. I usually went to the movies with my dad and had a shopping day with my mom. I don’t remember exactly when we stopped such routines. Was it after the Gezi Park Protests? The aftermath of these protests was among the incidents in recent Turkish history that put cracks in our hopes for the future and the joy we get when we are in our favorite districts in Istanbul. Or was it people in the family starting to get older and acquiring more serious illnesses? That certainly shifted our priorities when it came to how we spend time with the family.

 

Routines change over time, usually to create space for other routines. This is how we progress in life. For the most part, this is a good thing. But it doesn’t simplify the process of letting go as L.M. Montgomery also puts it.

“Outgrowing things we love is never a pleasant process.” L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

As a result of my many moves, coming from a relatively more complex country, and my family situation, I think I had to outgrow more than my fair share.

Regardless, I need to learn to cherish whatever form of time I have with my parents, friends, other family … rather than expecting to revive older routines. Maybe we get to do some of those older things from time to time, but we don’t need them to put higher value for our time.

 

Happy new year everyone! To new routines! :) 

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[i] My Grandmother

[ii] Losses

Navigating the World with a Turkish Passport: The Good, the Bad, and the Visas - Part 4

Part 4: Copenhagen

This year, shortly before summer, for the first time in my life, I made a serious attempt to buy a house. Not that I really want to own such big property, but I think unless I do this sooner rather than later, I will suffer financially in my old age, if I manage to reach old age that is. I reached out to my Danish bank to discuss mortgage. My initial conversation with the bank advisor ended with him telling me something like “Usually, we are more difficult with foreigners, but you seem ok. I can approve you for a loan.” I guess I finally made it as an immigrant after 14 years. Also, I now know how mortgage works.

 

In February 2018, I moved to Copenhagen to become an Associate Professor at IT University of Copenhagen (ITU), and to see if Copenhagen and I can satisfy each other’s criteria even though my home country pathologically doesn’t satisfy the Copenhagen criteria and I tend to be pathologically picky when it comes to where I live.

Five years later, I am still an associate professor at ITU, I love Copenhagen as I already told in the first post of this series, and, as of this year, I am also a permanent resident of Denmark.

 

Copenhagen has the sea (one year I managed to swim in from May to October), my favorite culture house (Huset), two easily accessible amusement parks (Tivoli and Bakken), 24-hour public transport, streets that I feel safe to walk on even at late hours and doesn’t feel deserted during a good chunk of the day, and a ~3-hour flight to Istanbul that doesn’t make you go through jetlag.

I live in a rental apartment that I really like, and I think my landlord is a decent human being.

Since I got my own PhD students in late 2021, I can say “I love my job” without hesitation for the first time in my life. Plus, I managed to establish a strong support system over time.

Denmark has also been the first foreign country that I lived in where some people pay attention to writing my name correctly. Not just the “ö” and “ü” in my surname, but also the “ı” in my name. To be clear, I don’t expect this from anyone. Even I write my name as “pinar” instead of “pınar” in emails. I insist on the correct form only in paper publications and presentations. But I appreciate it when people make the extra effort for this.

I don’t take any of these things for granted.

 

These five years haven’t been a smooth ride. I didn’t expect it to be smooth.

I didn’t really know anyone when I moved to Copenhagen. I had the weakest support system I ever had in my life in the beginning.

Setting up your own research group from scratch is, to put it very mildly, hard. Doing it while trying to build up a more decent support system and learning a new language is extra hard.

And they didn’t give me my permanent residency card on a silver platter; I took both the longest and shortest exams of my life to prove my proficiency in Danish at B2-level and knowledge of Danish culture/history, respectively. This doesn’t account for the time I spent studying for those exams. Furthermore, they made me go to Næstved. I wonder how many Danes have been to Næstved. For some reason someone decided to discontinue the fingerprint and photo procedures for the permanent residency cards in Copenhagen leaving Næstved as the closest location for this purpose if you live in Copenhagen. To be fair, going to Næstved is still easier compared to most people’s daily commute in Istanbul or the Bay Area.

 

Shortly before I applied for my Danish permanent residence, my temporary one was up for expiration. I had to go through the same application process twice within six months, minus the extra documents for the permanent one the first time around. These applications didn’t cost me anything in terms of money because Turkish people are exempt from payment in residence permit applications (500ish euros). I don’t know the historical reasons for this exemption, but I assume the Danes needed the workforce. On the other hand, these applications cost me a lot of valuable time and stress. I would really like to be exempt from that time and stress as well, especially after 14 years living abroad. I guess the stress side of it is in my control to some extent, but it hasn’t improved when it comes to permits and visa applications over these years.

An additional annoyance was that the expiration date on my temporary residence permit was right after New Year’s in 2022, and I usually spend New Year’s Eve with family. Despite applying for the renewal of my permit as early as I was allowed to, I couldn’t get the new one on time before my end-of-year trip to Turkey. I still traveled to Turkey, but I returned to Denmark on Dec 31, 2021, just in case. My renewed permit was in my mailbox, but it was extended for less than two years instead of the usual four due to the expiration date on my Turkish passport. I knew I was going to apply for the permanent residency soon, which would hopefully overwrite this temporary permit, so this was ok, but otherwise it would have been a “please kill me now” situation. The highlight of that New Year’s Eve was I slept though the mayhem of fireworks that usually takes place in Copenhagen on that night since I was too tired. Early next morning, I went back to the airport to do a mandatory COVID test (yes, it was still those times).

 

Thanks to my Danish residence permit, I at least no longer have to get a Schengen visa to travel in most of Europe, which is a blessing. On the other hand, I gave up my green card in early 2021. By that time, I knew I would likely not go back to the US, and, therefore, this was the right thing to do. As a result, I missed two conferences in the US in 2022 because I couldn’t get a US visa on time for them. Now, I have a US visa for another 10 years, so I am good for the time being. I don’t know if having a green card prior made any impact on the visa decisions, but it certainly didn’t shorten the appointment time and it lengthened my questioning at the airport while I was entering the US this summer for a conference. 

 

The ITU CS department used to have a coffee hour every other week. The first time I attended this coffee hour, I remember sitting there in my usual silence and social awkwardness among people that I don’t know very well yet. After a while, a faculty member approached me and started a conversation about some issues regarding the Turkish population in Germany.

I now identify this colleague as one of my favorites at ITU. I am also the kind of person who would much rather talk about the Turks in Germany than the Turkish food or the weather. However, in those early days in Copenhagen, that conversation reminded me why I wanted to move to the US in the first place after Switzerland and the trade-off I made when I moved back to Europe. My Turkish nationality gives me a heavier baggage to carry in Europe, and I am not allowed to let it go. At least, I now have stronger muscles for it.

Navigating the World with a Turkish Passport: The Good, the Bad, and the Visas - Part 3

 Part 3: USA

 

After Switzerland, I felt the need to be not in Europe. More specifically, I wanted to go to a place where I didn’t have to be reminded of my non-EU status often and I could speak the local language fluently. Thus, it made sense to search for jobs in the USA toward the end of my PhD even though the distance from USA to Turkey felt too much. In my research field, the job options in Europe were also highly limited compared to the USA at that time. (Things got much better from that perspective now in Europe.) In the end, both Twin Sister and I found jobs in Bay Area / Silicon Valley.

 

I lived in downtown San Jose, CA, USA for 3 years while working for IBM Research.

In San Jose, my non-EU status didn’t matter as long as I didn’t need to go to Europe. All that mattered was my IBM job contract.

With that contract, I found an apartment immediately in downtown San Jose. Twin Sister hosted me for a month before I moved there because the move-in date wasn’t immediate, but I got the apartment I actually wanted rather than settling for one that accepted me after many rejections.

With that contract, I didn’t have an issue opening a bank account.

With that contract, I had access to better healthcare than my US-citizen aunt.

 

I can also speak fluent English. Thus, getting things done and having a social life was way easier compared to Switzerland. Also, downtown San Jose is rich when it comes to cultural events that I crave compared to the other cities in the area that aren’t San Francisco. Within 30mins walking to my apartment, I had access to concerts, movies, musicals, plays, opera, comedy shows, and a really cool bookstore. These things may not matter to everyone, but they matter to me.

 

For my work visa, instead of betting on the lottery of H1B, IBM decided that we go for an O1. An O1 visa is given to, as the website writes, “Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement.” This is how one of my celebrity crushes, John Oliver, got to the USA as well. Your PhD degree can qualify you for it, but you have to prove your ability and achievements.

I shipped 6kg of documents to the US authorities for that proof.

Back then I had a shopping bag with wheels, since in Switzerland I didn’t live close to a shop and could usually shop once a week or every other week, meaning I had a big load when I shopped to be carried from a remote location, so a shopping bag with wheels was handy. I used that shopping bag to carry the documents for the O1 visa to the nearest UPS office.

 

6 months after I started working at IBM, I asked if they would be willing to petition for a green card application for me, since I heard from another colleague that they usually are. They gave a green light, and in my case the procedure was similar to the O1 visa application with slightly more documents.  This time, IBM shipped things for me, though, so I didn’t have to carry >6kg of documents with me to a UPS office.

Despite these smooth aspects, the green card application process was still challenging.

Due to several rules about staying in the US both before and after the application, I ended up not leaving the US for 18 months. I know this is not unusual for many people, but for me it was. It was the longest I have been away from Turkey. My parents visited me during that period once, but it was also the longest separation we had. Even during COVID lockdowns, I went to Turkey twice a year. What made things worse is that toward the end of that estrangement, my dad had a heart attack.

In addition to proving my worth academically, I also had to prove myself health-wise for the green card application. Among the requirements, there are several health tests and vaccinations. I was told that I didn’t have syphilis and I had good mental health. To that I said “Thanks! I guess …” I was told that I could have all the required vaccinations (5+ from what I remember) at once if I wanted and be done with them irrespective of what I was already vaccinated for. To that I said, first in my head, “Are you fucking kidding me?”, then to the doctor, “I prefer that you make a test first to see what I already have the immunity for, I will only be vaccinated for the rest.” In the end, I only needed boosting my prior tetanus and measles vaccinations. The morning after I received the tetanus vaccination, though, I was on the floor of my bathroom throwing up and feeling like all my bones were being disassembled. Within 30mins of hearing this incident, Twin Sister ended up at my door and took me to her house where she lived together with her then partner now husband. I spent the day on their couch.

After all these processes and convincing the US government that I wasn’t a former nazi and I didn’t plan to perform polygamy, I am unsure about getting married even to one person, I got approved for the green card.

Throughout this process, I questioned all my efforts trying to get a green card, especially considering that I didn’t think I wanted to live in the US in the long run, primarily due to its distance from my parents. But the day that I got my green card, all my doubts were gone. I cannot describe the happiness and relief I felt holding a residence permit that didn’t depend on my job for the first time in 7 years. Ironically, shortly after a year I got my green card, I moved to Denmark and put myself into a position where my residence permit depended on my job again. (Did I mention my dad had a heart attack?)

 

Which brings us to the year of 3 Schengen visas.

Early 2017, shortly after receiving my green card, I planned a longish trip to recover from being in the US for 18+ months. The trip would start with spending a few days with Partner in Crime in Frankfurt on the way to a Dagstuhl workshop, then continue with reuniting with my family in Istanbul, and end with a visit to Illegitimate Daughter in Paris. Due to the Germany and France hops of this trip, I needed a Schengen visa. I went to the German embassy a bit stressed out as I usually am at any embassy. I was carrying a printed excel sheet with me detailing the many hops of the trip. The lady handling my case was nice and thanked me for my careful preparation. I left the embassy relieved. Then, I got my visa covering only the travel dates. Nothing more. Nothing less. The Europeans didn’t want me in their land more than necessary. 

After that trip, it was clear to me that living in the US, especially in Bay Area, in the long run wasn’t for me, and I had to act sooner rather than later before the inertia crept further. I thought getting back to Europe was a fair trade-off between being closer to family while escaping the turmoil of Turkey after the recent coup attempt. Even if I felt systematically disliked in Europe, if I targeted bigger European cities with more diverse and international crowds, I could still find my tribe and necessary dose of cultural activities to balance things. Thus, I started to look for jobs in Europe. I wrote about the that process already in a blog post, Moving On, during my last week in the US.

During that job search, I did several industry job interviews that took place either at the US offices of those companies or online. On the other hand, the two academic interviews I did were both at location.

The first one was in Germany, and I was informed three weeks in advance. They had the interview structure of interviewing all the candidates on the same day, so there was one interview day that they determined for you without asking for your availability ahead of time. When I received the interview invitation email, the blood rushed in my body, and I became paralyzed briefly. Could I get a Schengen visa in three weeks?

After calming down, I wrote back to them that I needed a visa and whether it would be possible to change the interview date. While waiting for their reply, I checked the German embassy website. The earliest appointment date was way after the interview date I was given. On the other hand, I kept reading through the visa pages, and realized that because of the Schengen visa I got from the German embassy earlier that year, I was eligible for a visa application by post. I didn’t need an appointment, I just needed to send the documents to the embassy via mail.

In the meantime, the university replied that it would be difficult to move the interview date since it was a common date for all candidates. I asked them for an invitation letter to handle the visa process as fast as possible. They didn’t know what to write. I wrote them a draft, and they put it on an official letter and signed. This back & forth with them was at least quick.

I dropped everything at work and quickly gathered all the visa documents in a day. For one of the documents, there was a notary approval needed. I don’t remember which document that was for, but while searching for the notary in San Jose, I first ended up at a place where I asked if there was a notary there, after which I was asked if I wanted to buy pot. I replied, “No. Wrong address.” I eventually found the notary, shipped all the documents to German embassy, and received my visa on time. It was once again on my exact travel dates.

My parents were visiting me at San Jose at the time. It was the last week of their visit. They got to observe my anxiety through this visa process firsthand. At some point my dad told me “We of course want you to move closer to us, but we don’t want that at the cost of your mental health.”

The interview went well on my end despite being more worried about the visa than the interview itself during those three weeks of notice, but I didn’t get the job. 

In contrast to this interview, my now department head at the IT University of Copenhagen, Peter Sestoft, explicitly asked when it would be a good time to have the interview for me considering the visa process. We arranged a date that wouldn’t stress me. This time, I had to apply via the Danish embassy and couldn’t use the apply-by-post option. The Danes gave me a visa that was for 20 days even though my visit would be for about a week instead of the exact travel dates. How nice of them!?

I really hope I will never have to apply for a Schengen visa ever again in my life.

 

One of my favorite quotes from Cheryl Strayed is “Be brave enough to break your own heart.” As I mentioned in Part 2 of these blog posts, the day I left Switzerland was one of the happiest days of my life. The day I left US was different. Twin Sister drove me to the airport, Academic Sister met us there, I would have to leave them for good this time. They wouldn’t be moving to my next destination. Also, San Jose felt like a home by that time. I realized that I broke my own heart once already when leaving Turkey back in 2009. Probably it wasn’t fully healed, and I was now breaking it again. But it had to be done. Even though I had to deal with that heart break and starting from scratch once again in Copenhagen, I don’t regret leaving the US. I am way more content with my life in Copenhagen, which, combined with my higher emotional maturity when I moved there, made healing faster.

 

Next, in Part 4, which will be the last one of these posts, we will focus on Copenhagen.

 

Teaching Systems

I feel very honored to receive the ITU Teaching Prize this year.

As part of the award ceremony at ITU, I gave a brief presentation on what I teach to the general public. For this month’s blog post, I decided to share what I talked about during that presentation. The slides associated with this talk can be found here. This post is almost the same as my narration during the talk. I just elaborate a bit more here on some topics.

 

I work in a sub-field of computer science called systems. I love this field and feel very happy that I get to teach it.

What do we mean by systems?

I tend to work with data-intensive systems, which are systems that deal with storing, managing, and processing data. Therefore, I have my bias in my definition of systems.

A computer system is composed of layers.

At the bottom, we have the hardware, which could be the devices you use to store data or processors to compute insights from your data.

Next, we have the operating system layer like Linux, Windows …, whichever is your favorite, that helps us manage the hardware resources as we run several applications on top of that hardware.

Then, we have the frameworks that help us build applications. Especially here my bias comes into play because the framework examples I have are all related to data-intensive systems. These frameworks can be database systems like PostgreSQL, big data processing platforms like Apache Spark, or machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch.

Finally, we have the applications.

The systems field deals with building the layers underneath the applications to support those applications.

 

In my research, more specifically, I look at how these systems perform and whether we can improve this performance, because sub-optimal performance means you are paying a higher cost for something than you should. This cost could be money, time, energy, carbon footprint …, and usually these costs are all inter-linked.

Understanding the performance of a system often feels like being the doctor of a computer system to me. You do tests, collect a lot of data, and try to understand if there is something wrong with the system. For example, a thing we commonly do is to break down the execution cycles of a data-intensive system. The high-level breakdown could be as simple as categorizing the cycles that are busy, meaning your processor is actually doing something, or stalled, where your processor is waiting idly. If you notice a lot of stall time, then you may want to break down these stall cycles to understand where they come from. For example, they could be because of the complex code you have to execute in the system leading to many instruction cache misses. Then, the next question to ask may be “where do these problematic instructions come from?” and we go on like this to identify the issue and how to fix it.

 

To know how to investigate a system’s performance and come up with solutions to improve it, there are three key things to know.

1. How to devise a methodology to design experiments so that you can investigate the system’s performance,
2. The toolset to run the necessary experiments and collect the results, and
3. At least a basic understanding of the systems layers, even if you aren’t an expert in all of them, to be able to interpret your results and come up with solutions.

This is essentially what I teach.

 

Before I conclude, I also would like to touch upon diversity.

It is not news that women are underrepresented in computer science, and systems is among the sub-fields, where the female representation is consistently under the computer science average.[1] I am just one data point in the reported statistics, which sometimes feels like an over-simplification of my personal experiences in the field. I also acknowledge that this is a binary view on diversity, so I will try to talk about things in more general terms.

When I started my PhD, there was, and to some extent there still is, this stereotype of a successful systems person:

A successful systems person walks with a bravado, gives the impression that they already knew all the systems layers well when they were born, writes code for fun in their free time, and always has strong opinions, which they aggressively present to the world.

If you fit into this stereotype, it is perfectly fine, there is nothing wrong with that, and I am not here to judge. But if this stereotype is the only thing that we keep putting on the pedestal or creating a cult around, it will always be hard to reach a more diverse pool of talent.

I questioned my place in this field throughout my PhD due to this stereotype even though I loved systems research. This was partially because, early in my PhD, some of the more senior researchers, who could more easily fit into that stereotype, implied that I might not have what it takes to become a successful systems researcher. Luckily, I also had interactions with other senior people who chose to encourage me instead.

Now I am in a senior position, and I am well-aware that I have the power to both enforce that stereotype and break it, especially through my teaching. Thus, one of the things that I emphasize in my interactions with students is that everyone can learn computer systems as long as they are willing to learn and have the time. This is probably true for any topic you wish to learn anyway.

 

To conclude, I am really thankful to receive this award, and there are many I want to thank.

When I was in high school, once our literature teacher asked us to write an acknowledgements letter, and I wrote 12 pages.

But I will keep things brief here.

I would like to thank DIAS lab at EPFL, where I did my PhD, for giving me a safe environment to become a systems person.

I would like to thank my colleagues at ITU in general, and at DASYA lab in particular, for a supportive environment and helping me grow as an academic and a systems person.

I would like to thank Peter Sestoft for nominating me for this award in the first place.

Finally, I would like to thank all the students whom I had the privilege to teach. I know I am here to teach you, but I also learn from you all the time, and I really appreciate that.

 

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[1] Why Are There So Few Women in Computer Systems Research?