Photo
Dr. Osman Abul
Assistant Professor,
Department of Computer Engineering,
TOBB University of Economics and Technology,
Sogutozu, Ankara, Turkey.

E-mail: osmanabul [AT] etu.edu.tr
Phone: +90 312 2924263
Office: Room 160
Tobb etu logo


Education

  • PhD (January 2005): Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.
  • MSc (August 1999): Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.
  • BSc (June 1996): Department of Computer Science&Engineering, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.

Experience

  • March 2007 - ... : Assistant Professor, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey.
  • June 2006 - March 2007: Postdoctoral fellow, Institute of Information Science and Technology (ISTI-CNR), Pisa, Italy.
  • September 2005 - June 2006: Postdoctoral fellow, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway.
  • January 2004 - September 2005: Senior software engineer, Aselsan Inc. Ankara, Turkey.
  • December 2002 - December 2003: Research & Teaching assistant, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada.
  • August 2001-November 2002: Military service, Turkish Land Forces Hq. Ankara, Turkey.
  • August 1997-July 2001: (Senior) software engineer, Aselsan Inc. Ankara, Turkey.
  • August 1996 - August 1997: Research&Teaching assistant, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.

Publication

Theses
  • O. Abul. "Controlling Discrete Genetic Regulatory Networks", PhD thesis, Dept. of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, 2005. Advisors: Professors Faruk Polat and Reda Alhajj.
  • O. Abul. "Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning using Function Approximation", Masters thesis, Dept. of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, 1999. Advisor: Prof. Faruk Polat.
Refereed Journals
  • G. K. Sandve, O. Abul and F. Drablos. "Compo: composite motif discovery using discrete models", BMC Bioinformatics, Vol.9, No.527, 2008.
  • K. Klepper, G.K. Sandve, O. Abul, J. Johansen, V. Walseng and F. Drablos. "Assessment of composite motif discovery methods",  BMC Bioinformatics, Vol.9, No.123, 2008.
  • G.K. Sandve, O. Abul, V. Walseng and F. Drablos. "Improved Benchmarks for Computational Motif Discovery",  BMC Bioinformatics, Vol.8, No.163, 2007.
  • O. Abul, R. Alhajj and F. Polat. "A Powerful Approach for Effective Finding of Significantly Differentially Expressed Genes", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Vol.3, No.3, pp. 220-231, 2006.
  • O. Abul, R. Alhajj, F. Polat and K. Barker. "Finding differentially expressed genes
    for pattern generation", Bioinformatics, Vol.21, No.4, pp. 445-450, 2005.
  • F. Polat and O. Abul. "Learning Sequences of Compatible Actions Among Agents",
    Artificial Intelligence Review, Kluwer, Vol.17:1, pp. 21-37, March 2002.
  • O. Abul, F. Polat and R. Alhajj. "Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Using Func-
    tion Approximation", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics-C, Vol.30,
    No. 4, pp. 485-497, Nov. 2000.
Refereed Conferences
  • O. Abul. "Hiding Co-Occurring Frequent Itemsets", 2nd International Workshop on Privacy and Anonymity in the Information Society (PAIS’09), In conjunction with ICDT/EDBT'09, St. Petersburg, Russia, March 2009.
  • O. Abul, F. Bonchi and M. Nanni. "Never Walk Alone: Uncertainty for Anonymity in Moving Objects Databases", IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2008), Cancun, Mexico, April 2008.
  • O. Abul, G.K. Sandve and F. Drablos. "False Discovery Rates in Identifying Functional DNA Motifs", Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE'07), Cambridge MA, Oct. 2007.
  • O. Abul, M. Atzori, F. Bonchi and F. Giannotti. "Hiding Sensitive Trajectory Patterns", 6th International Workshop on Privacy Aspects of Data Mining, ICDM'07 Workshops, October 2007, Omaha, Nebreska.
  • M. Atzori, F. Bonchi, F. Giannotti, D. Pedreschi and O. Abul. "Privacy-Aware Knowledge Discovery from Location Data",The International Workshop on Privacy-Aware Location-based Mobile Services (PALMS'07),Mannheim, Germany, May 2007.   
  • O. Abul, M. Atzori, F. Bonchi and F. Giannotti. "Hiding Sequences", The 3rd International Workshop on Privacy Data Management, IEEE 23rd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2007), Istanbul, Turkey, April 2007. Also appears as a technical report of ISTI (acc. number 2006-TR-40). An extended abstract appears in Proceedings of Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems, SEBD'07.
  • O. Abul, F. Polat and R. Alhajj. "Asymptotical Lower Limits on the Required Num-
    ber of Examples for Learning Boolean Networks", The 21st International Symposium
    on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS), Istanbul, Turkey, Nov. 2006 (LNCS,
    Vol 4263 pp. 154-164, Springer-Verlag).
  • O. Abul, F. Polat and R. Alhajj. "Optimal Multi-Objective Control Method for
    Discrete Genetic Regulatory Networks", Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Bioinfor-
    matics and Bioengineering (BIBE), Washington DC, Oct. 2006.
  • G.K. Sandve, M. Nedland, O.B. Syrstad, L.A. Eidsheim, O. Abul and F. Drablos.
    "Accelerating Motif Discovery: Motif Matching on Parallel Hardware", 6th Workshop
    on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI), Zurich-Switzerland, Sep. 2006 (LNCS, Vol
    4175 pp. 197-206 Springer-Verlag).
  • O. Abul, G.K. Sandve and F. Drablos. "A Methodology for Motif Discovery Employ-
    ing Iterated Cluster Re-assignment", Computational Systems Bioinformatics Confer-
    ence (CSB), Stanford University CA, Aug. 2006 (Series on Advances in Bioinformatics
    and Computational Biology - Volume 4, 2006, Imperial College Press).
  • O. Abul, G.K. Sandve and F. Drablos. "TSCAN: A two-step de novo Motif Discov-
    ery Method", The 3rd annual RECOMB Satellite Workshop on Regulatory Genomics
    (RECOMB-RG), Singapore, July. 2006.
  • O. Abul, R. Alhajj and F. Polat. "Importance of Monitoring in Developing Optimal
    Control Policies for Probabilistic Boolean Genetic Networks", Proceedings of the In-
    ternational Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in
    Knowledge-Based Systems (IPMU), Italy, July 2004.
  • O. Abul, R. Alhajj and F. Polat. "Markov Decision Processes Based Optimal Con-
    trol Policies for Probabilistic Boolean Networks", Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on
    Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE), Taiwan, pp.337-344, May 2004.
  • O. Abul, R. Alhajj, F. Polat and K. Barker. "Finding Differentially Expressed Genes:
    Pattern Generation using q-values", Proceedings of the ACM Annual Symposium on
    Applied Computing, Cyprus, Mar. 2004.
  • O. Abul, A. Lo, R. Alhajj, F. Polat and K. Barker. "Cluster Validity Analysis Using
    Subsampling", Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and
    Cybernetics, Washington DC, Oct. 2003.
  • O. Abul, F. Polat and R. Alhajj. "Function Approximation Based Multi-Agent Re-
    inforcement Learning", Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Tools with
    Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI-2000), IEEE Press, Nov 13, 2000, Vancouver, British
    Columbia, Canada, pp.36-39.
Other
  • G. Ozdemir Ozdogan, O. Abul, A. Yazici. "Paralel Veri Madenciliği Algoritmaları", 1st National High Performance and Grid Computing Conference (Basarim'09),April 2009, Ankara, Turkey.
  • O. Abul, A. Yazıcı. ""E-Sağlık Alanı İçin Bir Ortak Veri Madenciliği Yaklaşımı", 3rd National E-Health congress-technical program, November 2008, Antalya, Turkey. (In Turkish).
  • O. Abul. "Çeşitli Tip Veritabanlarında Hassas Bilgi Gizleme", 2nd National Data and Network Security Symposium, May 2008, Kyrnea, Cyprus. (In Turkish).
  • O. Abul. "E-Saglik ve Mahremiyete Veri Madenciligi Kaynakli Tehdit", 2nd National E-Health congress-technical program, October 2007, Antalya, Turkey. (In Turkish).
  • O. Abul, F. Bonchi, and M. Nanni. "Never Walk Alone: Trajectory anonymity via clustering", Technical Report ISTI-007/2007, ISTI-C.N.R., 2007. 
  • M. Ege, O. Abul and O. Aslanturk. "Algoritmaları niçin analiz etmeliyiz?", Bilisim-2000 Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, 2000. (In Turkish).

Research

Interests
  • Data Mining
  • Bioinformatics
  • Machine Learning
Projects
  • "Veri Yayınlamada Hassas Bilgi Gizleme" (translates to "Sensitive knowledge hiding in data publication"), June 2008-December 2010, funded by TUBITAK (Turkish scientific council) under 1001 (scientific and technological research projects support) programme. 
Collaborations
  • Bioinformatics Group at NTNU led by Prof. Finn Drablos. link
  • Pisa KDD laboratory at ISTI-CNR led by Prof. Fosca Giannotti. link

Teaching

Professional

  • PC Member: 19th European Conference on Machine Learning and 12th Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD'09)
  • Reviewer: IEEE SMC-C
  • Reviewer: 2nd IFAC International Conference on Intelligent Control Systems and Signal Processing (ICONS'09)
  • PC Member: International Conference on e-Business (ICE-B'09)
  • PC Member: 24th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS'09)
  • PC Member: 20th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA'09)
  • PC Member: The 13th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD'09)
  • Reviewer: IEEE TKDE
  • Keynote speaker: IEEE International Conference on the Applications of Digital Information and Web Technologies (ICADIWT 2008)
  • PC member: IEEE Int. Conf. on Data Mining (ICDM'08)
  • PC member: Int. Conf. on Health Informatics (HealthInf '09)
  • PC member: IEEE Int. Conf. on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE '08
  • PC member: International Multi-Topic Conference (IMTIC'08)
  • PC member: Int. Work. on Practical Privacy-Preserving Data Mining (P3DM '08), (in conjunction with SDM '08)
  • PC member: IEEE Int. Conf. on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE '07)  
  • PC member: Int. Conf. on Health Informatics (HealthInf '08)
  • Fellow member: Int. Society of Intelligent Biological Medicine (ISIMB)
  • Editorial Board Member: International Journal of Computer Science and Software Technology (IJCSST)
  • Editorial Board Member: Open Software Engineering Journal, Bentham.
  • Reviewer: Knowledge and Information Systems Journal (KAIS), Springer.
  • Reviewer: Data and Knowledge Engineering Journal (DKE), Elsevier.
  • Reviewer: SIAM Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2008), Atlanta, Georgia.
  • Reviewer: The 11th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2007), China.
  • Reviewer: International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2006), Hong Kong.
  • Reviewer: International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS 2005), Istan-
    bul, Turkey. 

Misc

Language
  • Turkish (native), English (fluent), Italian (intermediate), Norwegian (beginner).
Awards
  • 18-month postdoctoral fellowship award by ERCIM.
  • 1-year research associate grant by ADSA lab of University of Calgary.
  • Several travel awards for conference attendances by ERCIM, NTNU, Aselsan, Univ. of Calgary, TOBB University.