Recommendation for Ozgur Balsoy

I have known Ozgur Balsoy as a graduate student for about 4 years.  He
took the first web technologies class that Geoffrey Fox taught at
Syracuse and did such excellent work on his class projects, very
high among a group of strong students, that I was happy to have him
become a TA for subsequent courses.

Since that time, Ozgur has been an outstanding TA for many classes.
Students like to go to him for help with their homework as he is very
patient in figuring out difficulties and explaining things to them.
His English is excellent, and he works with both undergraduates and
graduate students successfully.  He has been the senior TA for several
years:  assisting with preparing class examples, teaching other TA's
how to grade, and teaching a class once or twice a semester when I'm
gone.  We have also assigned him to be the TA for some distance learning
classes when we wanted to make sure that we had a dependable TA with
good communication skills to help the students via email.

Ozgur has also demonstrated his technical skills in several projects.
He and another student implemented a web-based on-line grading system
that integrates JavaScript pages with Java servlet backend to a
database, all running on a secure web server.  They did an excellent
job of designing and implementing this system, and it has been used as
the on-line grading system for our distance learning classes for almost
3 years.  They keep incorporating the latest technologies:  the latest
version uses an XML interface to the database, and Ozgur had some
excellent design ideas for making the XML interface with different
systems with databases of people involved with courseware.

More recently, as Ozgur has been preparing to do his Ph.D. work, I
have worked with him on developing ideas in software architectures
for distributed systems.  He has an excellent preparation for doing
a Ph.D. and has demonstrated many of the necessary qualities such as
his ability to work independently and the creativity to come up with
solutions to problems.

I have really enjoyed working with Ozgur and am
sorry to see him leave Syracuse and wish him well in his future work.

Dr. Nancy McCracken
Research Scientist, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center and
Affiliated Faculty, Computer Science Department
Syracuse University