Dr. Oguzhan Topsakal is an assistant professor of computer science at the Florida Polytechnic University (https://floridapoly.edu/) with a wide range of teaching, research and industry experience.
Dr. Topsakal experienced teaching and developing several courses in computer science. Having software development experiences in the industry that spans over 15 years, Dr. Topsakal enjoys sharing his experiences with concrete examples to facilitate learning. He is an advocate of an interactive teaching style that welcomes student’s active participation. He is very experienced in teaching Algorithm Design & Analysis at both undergrad and graduate level. His interest in teaching includes the Machine Learning course as well. He had the opportunity to design and develop mobile application development courses utilizing the Android platform. His experience in developing iOS and Android apps for over ten years helps him to deliver the essential concepts in mobile app development using a project-based teaching style. He also taught courses covering programming languages such as Java and C++. His teaching experience also includes developing and delivering a ‘Virtual Patient’ course for medical school students that helped them to create virtual patients to simulate the interactions between doctors and patients having specific illnesses.
Dr. Topsakal’s current research interests include applications of Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, and Optimization to discover novel approaches for solving problems in the field of medicine and education. He is currently focusing on rhinoplasty surgery, one of the most common and challenging plastic surgery procedures. You can learn more about his work on rhinoplasty here: https://digitized-rhinoplasty.com/
While earning his doctoral degree at the University of Florida, Dr. Topsakal worked on NSF funded projects focusing on finding innovative methodologies for data integration. Dr. Topsakal was an assistant professor in the Department of Management Information Systems and the Department of Computer Engineering at Uludag University in Turkey in 2015 and 2016. During that time, he was the recipient of two grants in the field of Augmented Reality from TUBITAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). One of the grants aimed to utilize augmented reality for improving the service quality of medical surgeries, and the other grant focused on using augmented reality to teach foreign language for preschool children. At Uludag University, he was also the advisor for the Technology Transfer Office for boosting Entrepreneurship in the community. During Fall 2016, he was a visiting assistant professor in the Virtual Experiences Research Group Lab at the University of Florida.
In addition to his academic experience, Topsakal gained extensive experience in the software industry, working at the IT departments of corporations and at fast-paced startups. He was involved in developing and managing many software projects and products. Dr. Topsakal also had entrepreneurship experience as the co-founder of two startups.