Alper Sarikaya

UW Graphics Group – Curriculum Vitae (cur. as of 2 Oct 2013)

I'm a second-year graduate student in the Computer Sciences department at University of Wisconsin – Madison. You can find me in-person in the Graphics Lab at CS 1347 or via e-mail at [lastname]@cs.wisc.edu.

My current research interest lies at bringing the power of visual and parallel computation to biochemical problems and creating useful tools for their domain experts. I am working with Professors Mike Gleicher (graphics) and Julie Mitchell (biostat) on chemical similarity analysis of protein surfaces using local, multi-scale descriptors.

Before Coming to Madison...

I did my undergraduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle. In five years there, I gained a bachelors degree in both Computer Science and Chemistry (ACS certification). My primary research advisor was Dave Bacon (currently at Google) in the area of quantum computation.

Before coming to Madison, I spent two years at Microsoft working on their telemetry-gathering systems. Yes, sending your crash reports gets those kernel-crashes fixed! Concurrently, I helped out at UW GEMSEC with computational chemistry and scripting, and also co-advised an REU student.

Past Projects

Some class projects, some research projects. Partly a collection for my own reference...

• Understanding Performance of Protein Structural Classifiers
  A. Sarikaya, D. Albers, M. Gleicher
  IEEE Visualization Poster Proceedings (SciVis), 2013
  [website] [abstract] [poster]
• Lightness Constancy in Surface Visualization
  D. Albers, A. Sarikaya, M. Gleicher
  IEEE Visualization Poster Proceedings (SciVis), 2013
  Best Poster Award
  [website] [abstract] [poster]
• "Molecular Recognition of Multilayer Graphene by Self-Assembled Peptides"
  Y. Hayamizu, C. So, A. Sarikaya, E.E. Oren, M. Sarikaya
  Advanced Materials
  [paper] (manuscript under review)
• The Limits of Adiabatic Quantum Computation
  University of Washington, Honors Senior Thesis, June 2009
  [paper] [slides]
• MapReduce for Repy
  University of Washington, CSE 490H – Distributed Systems, March 2009
  [paper] [slides] [code]
• Aconitase – Bioinorganic Structure and Mechanism
  University of Washington, Chem 419 – Bioinorganic Chemistry, June 2008
  [paper] [slides]

Random

I have been enlightened that we are the only Computer Sciences department in the nation (note the s at the end), so I'm excited to be in Madison. I helped out with the department's Welcome Weekend (2012); if you've come and still have questions, feel free to contact me!

Links

If you're into this sort of thing, follow me everywhere online.

• Alpertopia! (personal blog)
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Google+
• github (newish)
• Fuelly (trying this out...)
• Kickstarter
• LinkedIn
• Pandora
• Reddit
• Twitter
• Yelp (now Elite '13!)

Last Updated Oct 2nd, 2013