GRADS IN THE NEWS
IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Turkey recognized Bülent Sankur for his work on signals processing. Sankur spent his teaching and research career at Boğaziçi University over the last 44 years. In between he has had positions at the University of Ottawa, Delft University of Technology, Télécom Paris and Istanbul Technical University.
Bülent Sankur RC ENG 70
Sankur’s research is focused on signal and information processing and their applications to industrial design, health and security problems. Some of the areas he has addressed include information security, watermarking and hashing; human-computer interfaces and various biometric modalities; image and video processing with computer vision in focus; and 3D shape analysis. He has also initiated and supported Turkish conference series and summer schools, and hosted and chaired various workshops and conferences at the international level. In addition, Sankur has been involved in the development of Turkish scientific and technical terminology during the last four decades. He is presently leading a group of several hundred experts in the scientific terminology and dictionary project of the Academy of Sciences. Among all these achievements Sankur believes his most valuable contributions to be his thesis students: “I consider myself lucky to have had such brilliant students.”
Regarding his years at RC, Sankur says, “I still have very fond memories of those ’innocent years’ on the campus. At that time, the whole college had fewer than 700 students, approximately 1/17th of today’s Boğaziçi University. In a sense, everybody had a chance to meet and know everybody else. The education I received at RC was the essential core on which I could build my career. I still remember with gratitude our professors: Nedim ‘Baba’, gregarious and fatherly; Ferize Hanım, elegant and dedicated; Necmi Tanyolaç, authoritarian but with a vision; Haldun Gürmen, gentlemanly and witty; and Kemal Halıcı, knowledgeable and considerate.”
Published February 2021
