Turk Telekom (TT), the leading communication and convergence technology company in Turkey, provides integrated telecommunication services from PSTN and GSM to broadband internet. As of March 31, 2011; Türk Telekom group companies have 15.8 mn Fixed Access Lines, 6.7 mn ADSL Connections and 11.8 mn Mobile Subscribers and about 8000 Wi-Fi hotspots. Recently, Turk Telekom has founded TTVM (Turk Telekom Data Center) to provide data-center, cloud and virtualization services to its customers. Having total 3000m2 in 2 data centers (Istanbul and Ankara), TTVM is the first data center in Turkey with Tier 3 certificate. TTVM has secure 80 Gbps connection (IPS, DDOS, AV, AS) with 300 specialists providing services from IaaS to SaaS.
Turk Telekom has been a pioneer for R&D in Turkey. Two R&D Centers have been so far established in Istanbul Technical University and in Middle East Technical University in Ankara, to manage and encourage information and technology flow. TT Group R&D is building up our staff that will carry out the cutting-edge technology researches and we plan to realize the design, development and test phases of the products and services that will be developed in our laboratories and User Experience Center. TT Group R&D is also developing new technologies regarding our hot domains related with TT Group strategy with a team consisting of best-in-class professors and Ph.D/master students from the most respected universities in Turkey.
TT is a member of EURESCOM, ETNO, ETSI, ITU, CEPS, WiMAX Forum. Turk Telekom is Steering Board Member at Celtic-Plus, a cluster under Eureka, labelling the research projects on telecommunications and connectivity and to Eurogia-Plus, again a cluster under Eureka labelling research projects on energy efficieny technologies. Turk Telekom also gives active contribution to Networked and Electronic Media (NEM) Technology Platform and is in the Steering Board of NEM. TT Group has several EUREKA, FP7 projects including ROMEO (FP7) which is focused on live 3D multi-view media content distribution over heterogeneous networks and MEVICO which is focused on the evolution of the mobile packet core network for the LTE and LTE-Advanced radio access systems and MAGICIAN which will build a semantic based intelligent recommender system to improve end users’ quality of leisure and entertainment experience by gathering leisure and entertainment domain specific real and non-real time information from multiple sources. MAGICIAN’s coordination and idea belongs to Turk Telekom.
Turk Telekom provides commercial IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services as well as personal data storage services to its huge customer base through its data center, which is the biggest one in Turkey. With its expertise on cloud based applications and multimedia analysis techniques, TT’s role in ForgetIT will be on developing the cloud based personal preservation application which covers development of computational storage system in the cloud, multimedia techniques for preserved personal media data aligned with the forgetting model and communication mechanisms between the active and preservation systems at the end user side and cloud side.
Selami Ciftci received his B.S. degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2006 and M.S.E.E. degree from University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), Dallas, USA in 2008. Before joining Turk Telekom, he worked at Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, USA in Intel Corporation Labs. At Intel, he was working as a Network Software Engineer focusing on MAC and PHY layer enhancements for next generation WiMAX (IEEE 802.16m). He has a strong technical background in wireless communications and networking. He is currently working as an R&D Specialist in Turk Telekom Group R&D Directorate.
Emre Beceriklican received his BS in Telecommunication Engineering from Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Turkey in 2007. He started his master programme in Informatics Institute in ITU which he currently studies. He started working for Nortel Netas Telekomunikasyon A.S. in 2007 as Software & Patching Developer in charge of developing new features/enhancements with software patching to Nortel's worldwide customers for Nortel products. He has expertise in soft switch core network, gateways/gateway controllers, wireless networks (GSM, CDMA), Protel and C++ programming languages. He joined Turk Telekom in Istanbul, Turkey in March 2011 and is working as an EU Joint Research Expert in Turk Telekom Group R&D Directorate.
Arda Akman received his BS and MS in Electronics Engineering (EE) from METU, Ankara, Turkey in 1994 and 1997 respectively. He started working for T. Is Bank Data Processing Center in 1995 and worked there for 3 years before moving to North Carolina, USA to join Nortel Networks as a Software Developer in 1998. During the next 7 years in Nortel Networks, he designed and developed carrier grade products for fixed and mobile telecommunication technologies. After joining Ixia Communications (formerly Catapult Communications), NC, USA in 2005, he led the development of wireless network test equipment for GSM, UMTS and LTE technologies and worked there as a Senior Manager until moving back to Turkey in 2010. He has a strong technical background in embedded real time systems, wireline and wireless communications and networking. He joined Turk Telekom in Ankara, Turkey in 2010 and is currently working as an R&D Manager in Turk Telekom Group R&D Directorate.
Hüseyin Özkan received his B.S. degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering as well as Mathematics from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2007 and M.Sc. degree from Boston University, MA, USA in 2010. Before joining Turk Telekom, he worked at Mitsubishi Electrics Research Labs (MERL), MA, USA. At MERL, he was working as an Electrical Engineer focusing on automated Road Sign Detection. He has a strong technical background in Computer Vision and Statistical Learning Theory. He joined Turk Telekom in Ankara, Turkey in 2011 and is currently working as an R&D Specialist in Turk Telekom Group R&D Directorate.
