Dr. Kemal Oflazer, teaching professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, has been named associate dean for research at the Qatar campus. Dr. Oflazer has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon and his M.Sc. in computer science and his B.Sc. in electrical engineering from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. He has been working in the area of natural language processing for almost 25 years. He has been an active member of the research community and has published widely in the journals and conferences in this area. He has served on the Editorial Boards of Computational Linguistics, Journal of AI Research, Machine Translation, and currently serves as the book reviews editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering. He was the Program Co-Chair of ACL-2005 — 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the most prestigious conference on computational linguistics, and has also served as area chair and program committee member in tens of conferences and workshops.
Since 2008, he has been leading the natural language processing research effort at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar with a team of postdocs and research associates. He was/is the Lead or Co-Lead PI in six Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) NPRP projects, and in prior positions he lead many projects on Turkish natural language processing, funded by NATO, EU and TUBITAK — The Turkish National Science Foundation, and jointly by US-NSF/TUBITAK. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar he served on the faculties of Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey and Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He also held visiting positions at New Mexico State University and at Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on his sabbatical leaves.
“Kemal is an established researcher with an excellent track record of funding and publications. His knowledge of the Qatar National Research Fund will be an asset to Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar as we continue to grow our research programs,” said Ilker Baybars, dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.
