Photo
Dr. Osman Abul
Associate 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 162
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

  • April 2013 - ... : Associate Professor, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey.
  • March 2007 - March 2013 : 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.
Book Chapters
  • O. Abul. "Knowledge Hiding in Emerging Application Domains" in "Privacy-Aware Knowledge Discovery: Novel Applications and New Techniques", December 2010, CRC Press. (F. Bonchi and E. Ferrari editors). 

Refereed Journals

  • O.Abul and H. Gokce. ”Knowledge Hiding from Tree and Graph Databases”, Data
    & Knowledge Engineering, Vol.72, Pages 148-171, February 2012.
  • S. Gundersen, M. Kalas, O.Abul, A. Frigessi, E. Hovig and G. K. Sandve. ”Identifying
    elemental genomic track types and representing them uniformly”, BMC Bioinformatics, Vol. 12 No.494, 2011.
  • O. Abul, F. Bonchi and M. Nanni. "Anonymization of Moving Objects Databases by Clustering and Perturbation", Information Systems, Vol.35, No.8, December 2010.
  • O. Abul, F. Bonchi and F. Giannotti. "Hiding Sequential and Spatio-temporal Patterns", IEEE TKDE Vol.22, No.12, December 2010.
  • 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 Function Approximation", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics-C, Vol.30,
    No. 4, pp. 485-497, Nov. 2000.
Refereed Conferences
  • E.Yigitoglu, M.L. Damiani, O. Abul and C. Silvestri. "Privacy-preserving sharing of sensitive semantic locations under road-network constraints", MDM 2012: 186-195, July 2012, Bengaluru-India.
  • C. Silvestri, E.Yigitoglu, M.L. Damiani, O. Abul. "SAWLnet: Sensitivity Aware Location Cloaking on Road-NETworks". MDM 2012: 336-339, July 2012, Bengaluru-India.
  • I.Gumus and O.Abul. "Turkish archive digitization by human computation approach", INISTA 2012, July 2012, Trabzon-Turkey.
  • R. Ozcan, F. Orhan, M. F. Demirci and O. Abul. ”An Adaptive Smoothing Method
    for Sensor Noise in Augmented Reality Applications on Smartphones”, Mobilware 2011,
    June 2011, London.
  • D. Vitale, E. E. Kuruoglu and O. Abul. ” Long Range Correlations Between Nucleotide
    Triplets”, Int. Symp. on Health Informatics and Bioinformatics (HIBIT’11),
    pp. 241-244, May 2011, Izmir.
  • H. Gokce and O. Abul. "A Tradeoff Balancing Algorithm for Hiding Sensitive Frequent Itemsets", Int. Conf. on Knowlede Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR'10), October 2010, Valencia. 
  • G. O. Ozdogan and O. Abul. "Task-Parallel FP-Growth on Cluster Computers", 25th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS’10) , September 2010, London. 
  • O. Abul. "MotifHider: A Knowledge Hiding Approach to Sequence Masking", 24th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS’09) , September 2009, Cyprus.
  • O. Abul, H. Gokce, and Y. Sengez. "Frequent Itemsets Hiding: A Performance Evaluation Framework", 24th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS’09), September 2009, Cyprus.
  • 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 Number 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 Bioinformatics 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 Employing Iterated Cluster Re-assignment", Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (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 Discovery 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 International 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 Control 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 Reinforcement 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
  • O.Abul. "Privacy issues when sharing sensitive semantic locations in urban settings", MOVE COST Workshop on Analysis & Visualization of MOVEment,October 10-11 2012, Thessaloniki-Greece.
  • K. Dursun, A.T. Bilgin, C.Kılıç and O. Abul. "Mastermind Oyununa Yapay Zeka Yaklaşımı", Fırat Elektrik-Elektronik Bilgisayar Sempozyumu (FEEB 2011), September 2011, Elazığ. (In Turkish).
  • H. Gokce and O. Abul. "Hassas Bilgi Gizleme Uygulaması", ELECO 2010, December 2010, Bursa, Turkey. (In Turkish).
  • A. Kutukcu and O. Abul. "Mekansal Veritabanlarında Hızlı Sorgulama", Akademik Bilisim 2010, February 2010, Mugla, Turkey. (In Turkish).
  • 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.

Teaching

    Supervision
  • Emre Yiğitoğlu (MS, August 2012)
  • İbrahim Gümüş (MS, June 2012)
  • Elif Tuğçe Örs (MS, August 2011)
  • Engin Şahin (MS, June 2011)
  • Harun Gökçe (MS, November 2010)
  • Fatma Kaya (MS-non thesis, August 2010)
  • Gülistan Özdemir Özdoğan (MS, January 2010)
  • Arzu Kütükçü (MS, December 2009)
  • Sertel Asım Ünsal (MS, December 2009)

Professional

  • PC member: The 6th International Workshop on Privacy and Anonymity in the Information
    Society (PAIS ’13)
  • PC member: 7th International Symposium on Health Informatics and Bioinformatics
    (HIBIT’12)
  • PC member: The 5th International Workshop on Privacy and Anonymity in the Information
    Society (PAIS ’12)
  • PC member: International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2011)
  • Reviewer: International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics (IJDMB)
  • Reviewer: Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
  • PC member: 6th International Symposium on Health Informatics and Bioinformatics
    (HIBIT’11)
  • PC member: Int. Conf. on Health Informatics (HealthInf '10)
  • PC Member: 5th International Symposium on Health Informatics and Bioinformatics (HIBIT'10)
  • Reviewer: International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics (IJDMB) 
  • Reviewer: 14th International Conference on Information Visualization (IV'10)
  • PC Member: 20th European Conference on Machine Learning and 13th Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD'10)
  • PC Member: The 14th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD'10)
  • PC Member: 21st International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA'10)
  • 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.