Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Veronika Cheplygina

 

Note: My dear colleague Veronika Cheplygina, who got promoted to a full professor at ITU in April 2025, had her inaugural lecture on June 10, 2025. I was asked to say a few words about her before her talk. The text below was my write-up to be prepared for those words.

 

I came to know Veronika because of her interview at ITU. I usually make an extra effort to go to the faculty interview talks, because they are a great way to get to know not just potential new colleagues but also different research fields. In the case of Veronika, though, this wasn’t just about making an extra effort, I was like “I have to see that talk”, because it was titled “How I failed machine learning in medical imaging.”

 

Then, unsurprisingly, Veronika got an offer from ITU, and luckily, she ended up at our research group, DASYA. Shortly after, inspired by Veronika’s presence, more and more people in DASYA started to openly endorse cats. I didn’t realize that we had so many cat people in the group before. If ITU didn’t have “no pets allowed on premises” policy, I might have suggested getting a DASYA cat to 4E.

 

We also have a DASYA website that we almost never systematically update. The only time that website was properly updated was when Veronika created a game for it, which was a pub-quiz, where for each correct answer, you got a website-update-task to do. It turned a very mundane TODO-list into something fun, and we got work done very efficiently.

People from the former CS department also know of the pub quizzes of Veronika, as she also volunteered to prepare them for our department retreats. And every time, as we did those quizzes, I was amazed by how well they were prepared. So, that is a whole different unique creative talent that she has on the side.

 

For the last part of my speech, I was debating between the two topics that are at the core of my personal relationship with Veronika, which are the challenges of academia and Gilmore Girls. I think for today the former topic is more fitting, but in the spirit of Gilmore Girls, I will start with a movie reference.

In the movie The Meyerowitz Stories, by Noah Baumbach, one of the characters used to be a promising piano player but quit pursuing that professionally. At some point in the movie, he feels the need to explain why he quit, and here is what he says:

“It was like walking barefoot through broken glass to get a milkshake. I loved the milkshake, but, you know, my feet were bleeding.”

That line made me think of all the times I considered leaving academia. I technically left it for three years and then came back.

I know Veronika, you have also been there, because you very openly and generously talk about it and the challenges that drove you to that point. One of those challenges is in this profession we overly expose ourselves to other people’s opinions by design, and that is for good reasons, because when it is done constructively, it helps you grow, both personally and professionally, but sometimes it also leads to other people undermining you and your hard work by calling it things like “not real research”, which is also highlighted by the title of your talk today.

I am really happy that you didn’t leave academia, because what a loss that would have been.

And I thank you for working hard to create alternative paths for others in academia that don’t have to have broken glass, or when the broken glass is inevitable, at least to be there as part of the support system.

Big and very well earned congrats!

Looking forward to the talk and the celebration afterward!

 

All About My Mother (& Almodóvar)

 

My dad started taking me to the movies when I was four. At home, he let me watch whatever he watched on TV (typically cartoons, fantasy, science-fiction, or horror) without censoring things. I was fully immersed in all of it. 

My mom, in contrast, preferred romantic comedies. While I can’t relate to most romantic comedies even today, I am more open to this genre now, especially if it is also a musical. But back then, whenever mom made the movie choice, I became mentally checked out and wished we were watching a Tim Burton film instead. As a result, unlike my relationship with my dad, I hadn’t really connected with my mom while watching a movie or TV, until …

… we discovered Pedro Almodóvar.

 

It was late 2002. One day, a family friend, and one of my bonus mothers, took my mom to the movies, which is the only time mom went to the movies without me or my dad in my lifetime. After she came back, we asked her about the movie. To this day, I remember the level of excitement she had when describing to us that movie, which was Hable con Ella (Talk to Her). 

Shortly after this incident, one day I was perusing the TV guide on the newspaper (I feel old writing this) and realized Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother) was on TV that evening. I asked my mom if she would be up to watching Todo Sobre Mi Madre given that it had the same director as Hable con Ella. She of course said yes. 

I don’t remember if my dad was also present that evening as we watched Todo Sobre Mi Madre. As far as I am concerned, I was watching the movie with my mom and was mesmerized. It was the first time my mom’s and my movie taste met. It was the first time I was seeing such a diverse depiction of women, and not only straight women, on screen. It was the first time a movie I was watching made me think of all the women who were prominently in my life. 

 

When I lived in the US, at some point, I had a crush on a Spanish guy. During one of our long talks, I brought up Almodóvar. He thought Almodóvar made movies about the people who are on the fringes of society and not about “regular” people, and therefore, Almodóvar’s movies didn’t represent him. This was disappointing to hear, and unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last time I hear such a comment about Almodóvar. 

Let’s give some examples of what is viewed as “fringe” here.

Women. 

Mothers.

Sex Workers. 

Transgender people.

Gay people. 

People with disabilities.

People who were sexually abused by a parental figure or church. 

People who express their emotions loudly. 

People who have AIDS.

People looking for the graves of loved ones who were killed at the hands of a dictator.

People who have to live with chronic pain.

People who love someone despite being hurt by them.

People who care about but also are estranged from each other.

…

 

In Almodóvar’s characters, instead of “fringes of the society”, I often see my mother, my grandmother, my aunt, and all the other women whose inner-lives I have been exposed to as they were caring for me. The events and locations may not be the same, the style may be overly theatrical or soap-opera-ish, but the stories and emotions that burst out on the screen, and in contrast are swept under the rug or pushed to the fringes in real life, are recognizable.

Beyond his focus on women and gender, topics such as inter-generational impact of military dictatorship, religion, and, in his last film, euthanasia are all covered by Almodóvar with a political perspective that hits too close to home.

 

In Dolor y Gloria (Pain and Glory), the Almodóvar film with a protagonist that most closely resembles Almodóvar himself, we see scenes of the protagonist’s childhood, his mother washing clothes in the river with other women in the village singing together. Almodóvar’s love for these women and many others, his observations of their behavior, and his ear for their stories are apparent in all his creative work. I often think if we wanted to represent our (Mediterranean, Black Sea, Balkan, Latin American …) mothers collectively, it can be done through the archive of Almodóvar’s films.

In The Guardian interview for Dolor y Gloria, where Antonio Banderas plays the protagonist, Almodóvar says “I felt like a mother who has lost her son” when talking about Banderas leaving Spain for a career in Hollywood. In this light, I would like to conclude this post by wishing all who has ever mothered someone a Happy Mother’s Day, including Pedro Almodóvar.

 

PhD#2: Ehsan Yousefzadeh-Asl-Miandoab

 

Note: On April 9, 2025, my second PhD student, Ehsan Yousefzadeh-Asl-Miandoab, successfully defended his thesis (here is the preprint). I said some words about him after the defense. The text below was my write-up to be prepared for those words.

 

Ehsan started his PhD three months after Ties, but I knew of Ehsan before Ties.

By the time Ehsan applied for my PhD opening, I had already assessed Ehsan twice for different openings in our group. The first one was for Zsolt István’s PhD position and the second was for the DAPHNE project, both for very hardware-oriented topics that included FPGA programming. Ehsan was one of the strongest candidates for those positions as well, but world politics interfered. While FPGAs are the trickier hardware platform, when it comes to the US sanctions against Iran, the rules for GPUs are more relaxed, so I was able to hire Ehsan for my project.

 

Ehsan’s start at ITU completed the founding members of the RAD group: Ties, Ehsan, and I. Us three had a brand new group to establish, so came the website and the logo, where Ehsan led the efforts. 

 

In the beginning, I had to convince Ehsan to pace himself, and that is a challenge for someone like me who doesn’t know how to pace herself before experiencing exhaustion signs. Ehsan wanted to do his research, maintain an excellent github repo for all the code and data he creates, prepare extensive teaching material, record youtube videos for that material, write technical blog posts about the papers he has read, and fly rockets to the moon all at the same time. It is great to see that fire in someone, and one shouldn’t kill it. But doing everything in parallel isn’t possible, and one has to learn how to prioritize and adjust over time. I can’t claim I always guided him perfectly when it comes to prioritizing, but we established a more reasonable pace. 

 

For the core part his PhD, Ehsan took on a challenge where neither of us were experts on; using machine learning (ML) for systems. More specifically, he wanted to use ML to estimate memory needs of deep learning training workloads to effectively guide resource management and collocation decisions for these workloads. While testing different GPU collocation ideas, we found out-of-memory errors to be one of the biggest challenges against collocation and often overlooked in literature. Hence, we needed something to minimize them. We tried the more analytical techniques found in prior published work, but they led to drastic misestimations. So, Ehsan wanted to try out something learning-based to see if it could lead to more precise estimations. But, once again, we were not experts in ML. We tried and failed, tried and failed, on and on. Nevertheless, Ehsan persisted, kept asking for help from different ML experts, and got many good suggestions, but they did not lead anywhere either. In the end, Ehsan found the collaborator he was searching for all along; Reza. I cannot claim any credit in that search effort, it was all Ehsan, I just did my best to prevent him from giving up. With the help of Reza, Ehsan built his estimator, and the last two chapters of his thesis got unblocked. 

 

Ehsan also persisted despite the many challenging news coming from his homeland and not being back home since he moved to Denmark for his PhD. While I mention this here as part of my praise of Ehsan, I want to emphasize that no one should go through this, especially to get any sort of praise. 

As a result of this, some of our one-on-ones with Ehsan turned into venting sessions commiserating over politics and PD3.

 

And finally, a couple of fun facts. 

Ehsan probably knows Turkish music better than I do. I don’t know how many times I heard Turkish tunes coming from his office or headphones.

Early in his PhD, Ehsan decided to get some plants for his office and got me one as well. As someone who never managed to keep plants alive at home, including cacti, I somehow still manage to keep this plant alive, while Ehsan killed all of his. I even had to smush the alive parts of the plant back into the soil after its root broke off from the rest, and it keeps flowering, as you can see below. Looking at it is a good way to remind myself to keep being stubborn, and I hope I keep motivating my students to do the same.

 

Congrats for a well-earned PhD! Looking forward to collaborating further with you.

 

February 25, 2025 - after the root broke off from the rest of the plant.

April 10, 2025 - the current state.

Keep Calm and Embrace Your Anger

Jo: You don’t know, you can’t guess how bad it is! It seems as if I could do anything when I’m in a passion. I get so savage, I could hurt anyone and enjoy it. I’m afraid I shall do something dreadful some day, and spoil my life, and make everybody hate me. Oh, Mother, help me, do help me!

Mrs. March: [… starts with something soothing …] You think your temper is the worst in the world, but mine used to be just like it.

Jo: Yours, Mother? Why, you are never angry!

Mrs. March: I’ve been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I have learned not to show it, and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

 

In the first Avengers film, we meet Bruce Banner in a state where he seems to have figured out how to keep himself calm and not turn into Hulk. Tony Stark annoyingly keeps asking him what his secret is, but Bruce avoids the answer till the final battle scene, where this dialog takes place.

Captain America: Dr. Banner, now might be a good time for you to get angry.

Bruce Banner (right before he turns into Hulk): That is my secret captain, I am always angry.

 

In my pre-teens, I once kicked the door of the small bathroom in our house. After the kick, I froze, staring at the hole my foot created on the door. I was shocked at my anger, the reasons for it I can’t even remember, but my bigger shock was the realization of how shitty the bathroom door was. [1]

 

“I can’t image you angry.” is a statement I have heard many times, from different people, at different stages in my life. In contrast to these people’s impression of me, when I think of my anger, the hole I created on our bathroom door and the quotes listed above come to my mind.

I have had anger bursts like the door-kick all my life even though they happen less and less these days. Except for a very few occasions, they do not happen in front of people, and while there is an incident that triggers them, they are rarely due to one reason. 

 

Here are some occasions that made me want to turn into Hulk.

 

At EPFL, I usually had lunch with Twin Sister. During one of our lunches, we sat next to a couple of male EPFL students. One asked the other, in English, if he had sex with so and so, and after hearing the positive answer, he said “So, she was easy.” I turned to them, as they continued their dialogue, with the desire to break my lunch plate on the head of the guy who made the statement. [2] Then, I heard Twin Sister say in Turkish “Calm down. We can vent on this later.” I don’t know what she saw on my face to make her react that way, but when I turned back to her, I could see her anger on her face.

 

When I was interviewing for jobs toward the end of my PhD, during one of my one-on-ones, I was asked if I would be comfortable taking the whole parental leave if I had a baby. There were a lot of “if”s there, none of which should have been relevant to my interview. The bigger irony was this was at a place where the maternity leaves were (and still are) unreasonably short. I was angry but tried my best to reply calmly “I am not considering having a child anytime soon, but if I did, I would use the whole maternity leave as it is my legal right.”

 

The year I joined ITU, I once sent an announcement about a postdoc position in Germany targeting female applicants to the mailing list of all faculty members. Shortly after, I received the following reply from a male colleague.

“Hi Pinar

You might not be aware but Denmark has a law against discriminatory hiring practices. You can read more about it here (in Danish sorry) https://www.danskerhverv.dk/radgivning/ansattelse-rekruttering/rekruttering/det-ma-du-ikke-skrive-i-en-jobannonce/

Best regards

XXX”

While I swore at him in Turkish in my head, I decided not to reply to this email.

 

Then, here are some re-occurring triggers fueling my anger.

Whenever a white straight European man with a traditional family life mansplains to me and others “DEI is not just about gender.” after a mention of a DEI event that targets women in Computer Science.

Whenever someone says “this would hurt the chances of Turkey becoming a member of EU” after something anti-democratic happens in Turkey.

Whenever a corrupt politician’s career ends or takes a hit due to an affair instead of their actual corruption.

Whenever I read / see the news.

 

Finally, I have also moments where I simply have anger that is turned inward as a combination of both internal and external frustrations that are often a result of unresolved or under-processed anger.

 

There has been an increased awareness about accepting our emotions, even the ones that have negative connotations such as anger, rather than suppressing them, as they are a guide. This does not mean you must act on every single emotion but try to understand the underlying cause and see how we can address the cause.

“Anger is meant to be respected. Why? Because anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go. … Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out.”

The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron

When my cousin was rejected a Schengen visa for his trip to Copenhagen to come visit me back in Spring 2023, I was furious at the Schengen countries in general due to the spiking number of visa rejections toward Turkish people from all over Europe in those days. But I was even more furious at myself for not being able to give up my personal comforts and spending my best years serving a land, who will never accept me truly. With that initial fury, I remember wanting to write on our department Teams channel about this situation. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote some text but then deleted it completely and wrote a text message to Illegitimate Daughter instead. Chatting with her calmed me down. Eventually, I put my frustration into a series of blog posts [1, 2, 3, 4] about my passport’s relation to the Western world, which was probably way more constructive than writing something on work Teams.

Similarly, I am active in DEI activities both at my work and research community, as much as I can, rather than only venting frustrations with other frustrated parties.

 

In Season 2 of Sex Education, our teens discover a junkyard, where they can smash things to release their anger. I sometimes wish such a junkyard was available to me. In other words, I wish we allowed more room for venting frustrations without belittling them or even acting anger out through non-harmful ways, like my door-kick or the Sex Education junkyard, rather than labeling such actions uncivilized. A healthy dose of venting or acting out anger can help one to move onto the more constructive acting upon stage more easily, decide what the acting upon action should be, and minimize the anger/rage that eventually ends up being turned inward.

 

Tori Amos’ album Boys for Pele is a great example of art created by a person with silent (female) anger, and is my #1 go-to album when I need to calm down. On the album’s cover, Tori sits down holding a rifle. I am not an expert on rifles, but the rifle lock is not in a position that will allow you to fire. There are several interviews where Tori talks about her own interpretation of this album cover, and you are welcome to have your own. To me, it says, “I am not here to shoot you, but I am not putting the gun down either for your or anyone else’s comfort as it is part of me.”

 

Happy belated International Women’s Day to all my (angry) sisters!

 

[1] This small second toilet-only bathroom was a luxury considering that we lived in a two-bedroom rental. Later my parents bought their own place, which was bigger but came with only one bathroom, making this small bathroom, and the hole my anger created on its door, to be among the things that we reminisced the most from our previous home.

[2] No matter what I may dream in my head due to my anger, I want to make it clear that I have neither hurt nor wanted to hurt anyone physically in real life, at least not intentionally; once the frisbee I threw hit someone, and I was very sorry for it.

 

The Elephant Man & The Straight Story

Note: This post is written to commemorate David Lynch, who died last month. While I tried to keep it to a minimum, the post contains some spoilers for The Elephant Man & The Straight Story.

 

When I was younger, I spent a good amount of time thinking about Blue Velvet, in addition to frequently revisiting the scenes In Dreams play in the movie.

I take Twin Peaks (the original series, the movie, the revival, and all the extras) as a meditative experience and have no intention of delving deeper into its plot.

Watching Lost Highway or Inland Empire make me ask the question “Am I high?”

I am impressed by the new Dune movies, but I don’t have any desire to rewatch them, while I am happy to rewatch any David Lynch movie anytime including his Dune.

As someone whose tastes were often put into question during her 20s, I made my peace with the people treating me like an oddball because of what I like or dislike. So, when someone asks me if I like a film, book, artwork … and if my answer is “yes”, I sometimes add “but I also like David Lynch movies” to that “yes” to let the person decide whether they can trust my taste.

 

David Lynch was notorious for creating hard to comprehend and describe films. Despite creating confusion in viewers, his films were very clear on a few things: amplifying “there is more than meets the eye” both for the people and the places, unveiling the sinister behind the idyllic facades, and mixing up the usual and the unusual. Today, these patterns are called Lynchian.

Inspired by his patterns, in my attempt to commemorate him here, I pick the two David Lynch movies that are considered the most accessible to the viewers, hence the most unusual for David Lynch: The Elephant Man (1980) and The Straight Story (1999).

 

The Elephant Man is based on the real-life story of Joseph Merrick, who lived in London in the late 19^th century. Joseph, referred to as John in the movie, is treated as a “freak” by others due to the way he looks. He is admitted to a hospital by a well-intentioned surgeon, Frederick Treves. However, even at the hospital, the society keeps viewing John as a “freak”, and he becomes an object of display for the people, who pay to visit and see “The Elephant Man.”

During one of those visits, John hosts a high society couple, offering them tea and acting like a solid gentleman, while the couple acts odd and uneasy. It is a scene that subverts the labels we so easily put on people and makes you ask the question “Who is really the freak here?” Therefore, it is a scene that is as Lynchian as it gets.

I watched The Elephant Man back when I was as BSc student. I can’t remember the exact year, but it should be around 2007. After my watch, I thought it might be the best film I had ever watched, and this scene stayed with me. In my next chat with my father, whose love of cinema I inherited, I asked him if he had ever seen The Elephant Man. He said yes and immediately started to reminisce about this scene.

My dad saw The Elephant Man in theaters shortly after it was released. Despite the almost 30 years difference in our respective viewing of the movie, the same scene made a long-lasting impact on both of us. Yet that scene’s impact comes from being a part of the whole of The Elephant Man, making both the movie and that scene timeless.

 

The Straight Story is also based on a true story. It is the story of Alvin Straight, who made a journey from Iowa to Wisconsin on a lawn mower in his 70s, two years before he passed away, to visit his sick brother.

When we meet Alvin in The Straight Story, he is on the kitchen floor unable to walk. The movie juxtaposes him with a baby. Alvin is old, but for many practical purposes, he is like a baby.

Alvin hears about his older brother’s stroke. They have been estranged, and, as we have already established, Alvin’s health is not great. Both despite and because of these facts, Alvin decides to go on a trip to reunite with his brother. He can’t have a driver’s license due to his health, so he takes the lawn mower.

On the road, Alvin encounters various people. Each encounter represents a different phase of a human’s life, as the person/people Alvin meets gets older, and reveals a different dark story either from Alvin’s or the person’s/people’s past.

Eventually, Alvin reaches his brother, the person who is closest to his age among all the people he encountered on the road, completing both his personal and literal journey. As if this is not a satisfying enough end to this road movie, his brother is played by Harry Dean Stanton, who once played an iconic road-movie protagonist himself in Paris, Texas (1984).

While The Straight Story can be interpreted as the simple straight story of human life, all the human stories we hear in Alvin’s journey underlines the complexities behind all “simple” human lives, once again fitting the Lynchian.

 

I heard the news of David Lynch’s death when it was announced at Husets Biograf during the introduction for the screening of Revenge, the first feature film of The Substance’s director Coralie Fargeat. You could hear the audible gasps of the audience, including mine, as a reaction to the news, and we all raised our glasses to David Lynch right before Revenge started.

After I left the theater, I checked my phone, as we all do now as a reflex. There was a message from Illegitimate Daughter about the death of David Lynch. I texted a few people about the news as well including Sister in Movies. It was clearly a notable sad moment for all my close movie buddies.

 

David Lynch left a mark on so many people, especially because of his unique style. That style had the power to make us go through a cocktail of opposing reactions at the same time. For example, the In Dreams scenes from Blue Velvet, which I referred to in the beginning of this post, can make you feel fear, sadness, jealousy, love … due to what is going on in the foreground, and can make you laugh due to the figures in the background.

Overall, I am grateful to him for challenging us in all the good ways over the years.

Too Many Social Media Accounts & Boycotts

 

As people were moving away from X and joining Bluesky after the US elections in November, I was thinking how I ended up having accounts across five social media platforms that I regularly, almost daily, check. Why did I need all these accounts? Why did I feel the need to check them relatively frequently? Did I need to add one more account to that list now? …

In my ideal world, I would keep at most two social media accounts: one for private stuff and one for work. But we don’t live in that world. My consolation prize is I don’t have any of the corresponding social media apps on my phone.

 

My entry to social media was with Facebook. It was the second half of the 2000s. I was a BSc student at Koç University and a member of the university’s cinema club. I wanted a way to announce our events more effectively, beyond putting tiny A4 posters around the university. [1] Facebook seemed to be the platform people used for such things. So, I created an account but wasn’t a frequent user back then.

Then came the LinkedIn account in 2009 shortly after I became a PhD student at EPFL. I don’t remember why I joined exactly, but I assume it was probably because other PhD students were joining. I used to log into LinkedIn only when someone sent a connection request or when I changed jobs.

I got into Twitter, now known as X, in 2012, while still a PhD student. My goal was to use it for work and that hasn’t changed. How frequently I used the platform has changed, though. In the beginning, I checked it and posted there very infrequently.

I created an Instagram account in December 2020 to follow one person, Judith Liberman, whom I mentioned in a previous blog post about fairy tales. She has been a healing influence in my life, and Instagram is unfortunately the only platform to follow her properly.

Finally, I got a Mastodon account in late 2022, after Elon Musk bought Twitter. That was the first trigger causing many to flee Twitter. However, it didn’t stick, so I got stuck with both Mastodon and Twitter.

 

Which brings us to the state of affairs today.

I started using Facebook more frequently after moving abroad. It was a way to keep connected to people as I moved from place to place. Facebook is also the most effective platform for keeping up with the events at your favorite local small independent cinemas, theaters, concert venues, etc. While these days Facebook shows too many ads, if you use the free version, most ads I see are about cultural stuff as well (Ursula K. Le Guin quotes – somewhat ironic to see on Facebook, The Atlantic / New Yorker articles, Taylor Swift news ...) and at times helpful (I discovered Say Nothing through Facebook).

Last few years, it has become more common to use LinkedIn for work announcements in academic circles. Staying connected to my research community and having an effective platform to do work announcements is important to me. As a result, I became a more frequent user of LinkedIn as well.

I became a more active Twitter/X user after I moved to Denmark. Combination of being away from Bay Area, Mecca of our profession, and my increasing responsibilities as a professor made the platform more appealing to post work news and follow posts of others. Up until the latest US election, X was the best platform for staying connected to my work community. Since my main goal has always been to use X for work, I (almost) only follow the people I know through work on X. Therefore, I see non-work-related posts only if the people I follow post them. After Elon bought the platform, I started seeing posts of him in my feed, even though I have never followed him. Before I figured out the “For You” vs “Following” tabs at the top, my solution was to block him. Then, I decided to keep him blocked. After many people fled to Bluesky, I stopped using X actively.

My 3-following-and-2-followers existence on Instagram didn’t last long, as people discovered I am on Instagram as well.

And I kept Mastodon active, if not as active as X, with the hope that one day it may become as effective as X for work posts.

Today, I also use all these platforms, except for LinkedIn, to announce my blog posts. On X, I have a separate account for this, though.

 

As people were migrating to Bluesky as a boycott to X’s owner, my first reaction was “I don’t want a 6^th social media account.”

If the motivation is to move away from the political manipulation of too-powerful tech bros, Mastodon makes more sense as a platform because of its mode of operation; it is open source and self-service. Our Mastodon server at ITU is run by Sebastian Büttrich, who is in our research group. The computer systems community has discuss.systems. In Mastodon, we have more control!

One the other hand, Mastodon hasn’t gathered enough attraction among the work circles I would like to be connected to. I have less than 1/10^th of my Twitter/X followers on Mastodon. 1/3^rd of the folk that follow me are colleagues at ITU. I don’t know how/if I can boost it better. I already share a physical workspace with my ITU colleagues, so my social media presence isn’t really for them. Most of the time, I feel like I am posting for myself there, which I don’t mind on a platform like Instagram, since it creates a blog-picture diary for me, but this isn’t why I use Mastodon. If I want to post an announcement about an open PhD position or travel grant for a conference, I would rather be on a platform that can deliver that announcement to the right set of people. Unfortunately, Mastodon is far from doing that at the moment, and I don’t hear relevant work news on Mastodon either.

So, eventually, I will choose the easy way out. I will get a Bluesky account at some point in 2025, even if I don’t want to.

 

My conflict with creating a Bluesky account reminded me of my conflicting relationship with boycotts, since what triggered all this was people boycotting X. Boycotts are also an important topic these days due to ongoing wars.

I come from Turkey, which is a country that is an easy target for boycotts. I wrote a relatively frustrated blog post back in 2017 on this matter. There have been famous cultural figures (e.g., Bono, Paul Auster) who stated that they won’t visit Turkey due to its human right violations, issues with freedom of press, etc. I know some people who told me that they won’t visit Turkey as long as Erdoğan is in power. I respect and support these causes (even though I don't like Bono). However, at times, such statements feel strange to hear about a place where my primary connection is love. I don’t mean nationalism, which I am a grinch for. I mean feelings of tenderness for some place and the people who live there even if you don’t like everything about it / them. I love visiting Turkey and hope that I will always be able to visit it. This doesn’t mean that I support the human rights violations, lack of freedom of press, or Erdoğan. [2]

I know boycotting a social media app, a person of power, and a country are all different. However, whether it is an app, a person, or a country, it is easier to boycott something when you don’t strongly depend on it or don’t have a strong relation to it. In other words, being able to boycott may be a privilege that we don’t realize. This is why someone like Bono will never boycott the USA no matter what it does or whoever its president is.

I am very open to discussing different views on this and being educated if anyone has good recommendations for reading or listening on the impact of boycotts. I listened the “BDS and the history of the boycott” podcast episode earlier this year but didn’t hear anything new. For example, do economic boycotts usually benefit or cause more harm in the end? Don’t people’s isolation and deteriorating economic conditions, due to boycotts, help the authoritarian leaders in a country? Isn’t this a double-punishment of people in that country who do not support such leaders? … Overall, I have a lot of questions and dilemmas when I think about boycotts, and, as I said, I am open to discussing and learning.

 

[1] Orthogonal but related anecdote: I was once confronted by some guys from the university’s American football team for putting up A4-size cinema club event posters on top of their giant posters advertising an upcoming party. Needless to say, they were each multiple times my size. In my defense, there was no space left on the announcement boards due to their giant posters. I managed to defend our posters.

[2] I remember the days when Erdoğan was being presented as the face of modernizing Turkey by the western media and having to explain myself to some Europeans, since they were asking me why I don’t like him. I also remember the days when the EU gave him a lot of money, hence supporting him, so that he keeps the refugees away from the Europeans.

 

PhD#1: Ties Robroek

Overview of Ties' thesis work. Preprint of the thesis can be found here.

Note: Yesterday my first PhD student, Ties Robroek, defended his thesis! I said some words about him after the defense. The text below was my write-up to be prepared for those words. The speech itself was of course slightly different.

 

I sent the email offering my first independent PhD position to Ties on June 6^th, 2021, at 11:07am. At 12:10pm, I received a reply that said “… I accept your offer …” with a level of enthusiasm that made me think “No one has ever been this excited to hear that they will work with me. That is nice.” Then, I made a mental note “He has to learn not to accept any offer before seeing the contract first.”

 Ties started on September 1^st, 2021, less than two weeks after I was done being the general co-chair of VLDB 2021 and 3.5 years after I joined ITU.

I finally had what I wanted, my own PhD student.  I was very happy, but as is often the case when you are doing something for the first time, I wasn’t sure about many of the things I was doing. Of course, I had supervised many other BSc/MSc/PhD students before, but, with Ties, for the first time I had full responsibility for someone else at work. It felt like I could make or break his career. Furthermore, the project was on a topic that was relatively new to me, ML not databases, which added to the feeling of unsureness.

But here we are today, so it all worked out.

I think there were two key reasons why it worked out.

First, we managed to have an open dialog, especially when it came to our doubts. We didn’t agree all the time, but that never hindered the open dialog.

Second, Ties took initiative early on. From the beginning, his attitude was “You know hardware, but not machine learning, so I will work to be the one providing the machine learning expertise in the team.”  Luckily, he is a data scientist at heart, so embracing that responsibility came naturally to him.

Overall, Ties has been great at combining his data scientist identity with computer systems research. One of the first things he did was to create the radT platform, on top of MLFlow. I didn’t tell him to do that, at least not explicitly. Based on what we discussed, it was clear that we needed a systematic way to do benchmarking and collecting experimental data, and radT was his solution for that, which later became the first contribution in his thesis. Since then, radT kept evolving and is used in several research (BSc/MSc/PhD-level) projects hosted by our research group.

Furthermore, while implementing radT and any other codebase that later became part of his thesis, Ties’ primary design goal was always “I want a data scientist to use this, so it needs to come with minimal impact to their code.” I appreciate this perspective, and we “computer systems” people need to remind this to ourselves regularly.

Also, some fun stuff.

 

When someone shared the meme below with me in a group chat, the first person I thought of was Ties, so today he will get a card with this image on.

Note: I don’t know the original source for this picture, but a quick search led me to this LinkedIn post.

 

Speaking of cards, once I asked Ties to get a card for a lab member’s departure. Ties kindly accepted the request, but asked “So, your generation, whichever letter you are, where do you buy cards?” (If, like Ties, you don’t know the answer to this question; supermarket works.)

 

Earlier this year, Ties made me realize that I had been mispronouncing the word gouda. 

 

If you ask Ties “What do you recommend doing in Amsterdam?”, he will likely give you the answer “You can take the train to another town.”

 

Finally, we all have different ways of dealing with stress. While I was writing my thesis, I took a walk almost every day near Lac Leman, usually listening to Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk. In contrast, Ties did a triathlon and a DHL run within the last two weeks of his thesis submission deadline. At one point I was worried that he will kill himself before submitting his thesis. Then, one week after his thesis submission, he did something called Nordic Race. Looking at its website, Nordic Race seems like an event designed to help people enter Valhalla.

Anyway, I am glad he is still alive and is now a Dr.