Tolga Durdu, PhD
Managing Director
Tolga is the cofounder and Managing Director of Accelera. He has 20+ years of enterprise business and IT experience at leading banks. Because of his career spanning both business and IT domains he has strong business acumen and deep understanding of marketing, operations, finance functions, as well as information management and analytics technologies. As the founding president of Turkish Data Management Association (DAMA International Turkey Chapter) Tolga is a sought after consultant in data management, analytics, and marketing technologies to leading companies in Turkey and EMEA region. He is an Adjunct Professor teaching Data Science and Big Data Management courses at Özyeğin University. He also teaches Data Science, Business Analytics, and Information Management professional training courses for Turkish Banking Association. He completed his PhD study with a research interest in managerial issues surrounding Data Science and Advanced Analytics. Tolga has proficiency in implementing business analytical solutions and data science techniques for top line growth. He is an expert on advanced multivariate statistical techniques, exploratory and predictive analytics, machine learning, linear and nonlinear optimization.
He holds a BS degree in Industrial Engineering with high honors from Boğaziçi University. He also holds an MA degree in MIS and PhD degree in Management from Boğaziçi University.
Ergün Arsal, PhD
Head of Strategy and Organizational Development
Ergün is a partner and Head of Strategy and Organizational Development of Accelera. He started his PhD study in Management Information Systems at Clemson University in the US where he also taught IS courses and engaged in research on e-commerce, online consumer behavior, and technology adoption. He completed his PhD study at Boğaziçi University where he researched individual adoption of Data Science and Advanced Analytics technologies. Currently, he teaches various undergraduate, graduate and MBA courses in topics ranging from Management and MIS to Statistics at Istanbul Bilgi University. Some of these courses are part of joint degree programs with London School of Economics and University of Liverpool. His work has been accepted into premier IS journals such as Decision Support Systems, Information & Management, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. These studies have been cited more than 500times in other articles in areas that range from computer science to tourism and management to economics. He is an expert on exploratory and mixed method research techniques as well as field experiments, experimental design, advanced multivariate statistical analysis.
He holds a BS degree in International Relations from Istanbul University. He started his PhD study in Management Information Systems at Clemson University and received a PhD degree in Management from Boğaziçi University.
Kerem Bülbül, PhD
Head of R&D
Kerem is a partner and Head of Research and Development of Accelera. After graduating from Boğaziçi University, he obtained his Phd degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from University of California at Berkeley in the US. During his Phd studies, he also worked as a researcher for the Human Genome Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and for the Wireless Infrastructure Division of HP. Upon completing his PhD, he joined Rapt Inc., a technology startup in San Francisco developing analytic solutions for product pricing (later acquired by Microsoft Advertising). There he was leading the business problem modeling and analytics solution implementations. Upon returning to Turkey in 2003, he joined the Industrial Engineering Program at Sabancı University where he continues to teach operations research and advanced analytics courses to both undergraduate and graduate students. In addition, he also teaches courses in the Data Analytics Master’s Program geared towards professionals. He also served as the Head of the Industrial Engineering Program for a three and a half year period until January 2018 and is currently a full Professor of Industrial Engineering. He has been a scientific advisor in advanced analytics R&D projects to various companies in sectors ranging from retail, to airlines, municipalities, and manufacturing. He is an expert on predictive and prescriptive analytics, including mathematical and stochastic programming, computational optimization, multi-criteria decision making. He has published around 30 papers in leading journals and conference proceedings of his field.
He holds a BS degree in Industrial Engineering with high honors from Boğaziçi University. He has MS and PhD degrees in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from University of California at Berkeley.
Kemal Ünaltuna, PhD
Principal Consultant
Kemal Ünaltuna is a Principal Consultant at Accelera. He has more than 25 years of experience leading decision support and intelligent systems solution development initiatives in telecom, financial, media, retail/e-business, and utility industries. During his doctoral studies on Artificial Neural Networks at Syracuse University in the US, he worked at a university Artificial Intelligence start-up mainly serving utility industry clients in the region. After obtaining his PhD degree, he started working at AT&T Bell Labs as Data Mining Expert where he created several Sales and Marketing data science models. In 1998, he joined Yapı Kredi Bank, one of the leading private banks in Turkey. Till 2005, he spearheaded multiple initiatives establishing data warehousing, CRM, business intelligence, and data mining platforms for Yapı Kredi Bank. In 2006, Kemal left Yapı Kredi Bank and co-founded Intellica, the leading data warehousing, business intelligence and Big Data systems integrator in Turkey and the neighbouring region. In 2015, he and the other Intellica co-founder spun-off the complex event processing product EVAM (Event and Action Manager) as a separate company from Intellica. Today, EVAM is one of the leading products in the complex event processing/streaming analytics space across the world. In 2016, Kemal sold his Intellica shares yet continued working there as Lead Consultant. Since 2004, he has served as an adjunct professor first at Marmara, then at Bogazici University. He is currently teaching graduate and undergraduate level courses in MIS and Data Science at Bogazici University. Kemal is an expert in data modeling, advanced statistical analysis, neural networks/deep learning, as well as the broader supervised and unsupervised machine learning domain. He has several publications and presentations in various academic journals and conferences.
Kemal holds a BS degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University. He also has MS and PhD degrees both in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University.