Mehmet Akşit

Mehmet Akşit, as a scientific member (full professor) of the TOBB ETÜ Engineering Faculty Computer Engineering Department and the Director of the Smart-City Research Lab., holds an M.Sc. degree from the Eindhoven University of Technology and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Twente. He has worked at the University of Twente between 2000 and 2019 as a full professor (Software Engineering Chair). 

He has served many conferences and symposia. For example, he was the program (co) chair of ECOOP'97, SACT'00, HQSAD'00, NoD'02 and AOSD2003. He was the tutorial chair of the ECOOP'92 conference and the organizing chair of the AOSD'02 conference. He has been also serving as a program committee member of many international conferences and as a reviewer of several journals.

He is the co-founder and has been the co-editor in chief of Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (published by Springer-Verlag) until March 2007. He has organized special journal issues as a co-guest editor on topics such as “Computational Intelligence in software engineering”, “Auto-adaptable systems”, “Model Driven Architecture”. In addition, since 1988, he has been serving as a reviewer of various European projects. He is the co-founder of Aspect-oriented association, where he has served as the steering committee member until March 2008. He is a steering committee member of AITO, which organizes the ECOOP conference series. He is a steering committee member of the Turkish Software Architecture Group, which organizes National conferences on this topic.

Since 1990, he has given more than 150 international and in-company courses and conference tutorials mainly in the Netherlands, but also in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and in the United States. He has organized special training programs for a number of multi-national companies, where he trained hundreds of software designers and architects.

As a visiting scientist, in 1989 he was at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory, New York, in 1993 at the University of Tokyo, and in 1994 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. When he was working for Océ Nederland from 1981 – 1982 and 1983 - 1987, first he worked on image processing and coding techniques to be used in digital copiers. Later he worked on office system software. After moving to the University of Twente in 1987, he has been involved in many practical projects and designed various large-scale software architectures, which some of them are currently being utilized in products. Some of the research tools developed by the chair are now being used in some industrial applications.

He has served as a consultant for large organizations such as in 2006 the Dutch Ministry of Traffic where he has evaluated large-scale applications of software systems managing traffic-flow. Also, in 2007 he has served the Dutch Tax office by giving consultancy and training.  He has been working as a consultant for several companies (for example, Ericsson, Philips, ASML, Océ (Canon), Thales, Beko-Grundig, TAI, Aselsan, Havelsan, Roketsan, Capgemini, Siemens, Softtech) and involved in the design and implementation of many software systems.

He and the members of the Software Engineering Chair were among the pioneers of aspect-oriented programming (Sina & Composition Filters), synthesis based controlled problem solving techniques, fuzzy-logic based techniques to modelling software design heuristics and processes, and new design formalisms to evaluate various software metrics (May 5, 2020: Citation: 16.696, H index; 35, I10 index 101).

In 2020, at the TOBB Economics and Technology University, with the help of generous grant by the TÜBITAK BİDEB 2232 programme titled "The International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers“, he has established the Smart-City Research Lab. in Ankara. As an application of smart-City systems, he has recently focused on managing pandemic disasters. To this aim, he has pioneered the establishment of the Alliance on Digital Management of Pandemic Disasters (ADMPD).