Bora M. Alper

Experience

• Software engineer at Stripe Tax.

• Ported Knative Eventing to run on vHive, an open-source framework for serverless experimentation developed by Edinburgh Architecture and Systems (EASE) Lab.

• Tutoring & demonstrating “Functional Programming”, “Reasoning and Agents”, “Software Engineering” and “Object Oriented Programming” courses.
• Helping students solidify their knowledge through letting them experiment in a friendly environment.
• Communicating with the professors to help them get a deeper insight in how their work is received by students.

• Summer internship at the School of Engineering funded by EPSRC project SynBIM, working with Dr Timm Krüger.
• Extending the existing C/C++ simulation code to an arbitrary number of diffusive species.
• Implementing chemical reactions between different species.
• Assisting with back-end code for website and website user interface.
• Supporting and training chemical engineering researchers in basic coding and running simulations.

• Built mathematical models of the Foundation’s finances to ensure operational effectiveness and manage risks of their investments.
• Led the design and development of a semantic search engine and a knowledge base for the open-access scientific literature. Determined the product requirements by talking to researchers (fellows) and start-ups to understand their needs. Delivered in a month, currently in closed-beta.
• Collaborated on the curation of handwritten Armenian letters dataset. Developed an extractor using OpenCV, helped with the testing of different neural network architectures and wrote the data augmentation pipeline.

• Marked the exams of “Introduction to Computation” by the special request of Prof Dr Michael Fourman.

Education

• Currently 1.1 with a weighted average of 82.
• Received Scholæ Mundi Scholarship, Edinburgh Award, and Functional Programming Competition Second Prize.
• 3^rd year courses:
  • Compiling Techniques
  • Operating Systems
  • Computer Security
  • System Design
  • Foundations of Natural Language Processing

• An international high-school with 200 students from 60 different countries.
• High-level courses: Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy.
• Final grade: 36/45.

• Average grade: 83/100.

Publications

Analysed the number of errors returned as values from functions in Go, to explore the inefficiencies of Go’s error handling mechanisms. Cited by Herb Sutter, a prominent C++ expert working at Microsoft, in Zero-overhead deterministic exceptions: Throwing values.

Published on the blog.

Developed a new algorithm for generating checksums of decimal codes, that can detect 91.05% of all transmission errors, outperforming industry-standard Luhn Algorithm, and performing on-par with other modern algorithms such as Damm and Verhoeff. Written as an extended essay during my International Baccalaureate programme.

10.5281/zenodo.2541760

Organisations

Leading Turkish Society at the University, whilst collaborating closely with the Turkish Consulate for communicating with the diaspora. Overseeing the initiatives of the committee, organising flagship events, and raising funds for the society.

Awards

Awarded for volunteering abroad in the summer of 2019 as a research intern in Armenia.

Awarded to piet∞ – interactive, infinitely-recursive, procedurally-generated Piet-esque compositions.

Scholarships

Receiving a grant from Scholæ Mundi Foundation on the basis of my academic achievements for my studies in The University of Edinburgh.

Received a grant from United World Colleges on the basis of my success in high-school for my studies in UWC Dilian.

Languages

Turkish

Native

English

Second-language

German

Proficient, with B1 CEFR certificate

Russian & Armenian Créole

Beginner