Letter from Geoffrey Fox for Ozgur Balsoy Ozgur Balsoy has worked with me and Nancy McCracked in the dual role of teaching assistant and researcher. As Kivanc Dincer explains in his letter, Ozgur addresses his weakness in Englist (seen in old verbal GRE) in 1995 and now his command of English is superb and we in fact tend to exploit this by always using him as TA in our Internet technology classes both at Syracuse and delivered at a distance. Nancy points out his excellent reputation in this area. Ozgur like my other students has a masters degree from Computer Science at Syracuse and is admitted into the PhD Program. His research interest builds on class projects developed in our "Internetics" curriculum and he played a significant role in the design and implemnentation of our class database which although it started as a class project, is used to manage all our classes for grades, homeworks etc. His PhD topic will probably be on the use of dynamic XML systems to act as a flexible "middle-tier" for new generation of web-based education systems. Ozgur now has full command of the basic technology and I expect him to be a very succesful researcher. I strongly recommend him to the FSU PhD program. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Letter from Dr. Kivanc Dincer for Ozgur Balsoy -------------------------------------------------------------------- March 18, 2000 Computer Science Department Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32306-4530 To Whom It May Concern: I am pleased to write this letter of recommendation for Mr. Ozgur Balsoy whom you are considering for the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at your department. I first met Ozgur in early 1995 when he was studying English as a Second Language at Cornell University. He had come to the US long before the beginning of Fall semester so that he could reserve some time for improving his English speaking skills and make his applications for Master's personally. He was thinking professionally. Ozgur was later accepted to the Master's program in Computer Science at Syracuse University. He has attracted my attention as a young and talented individual with exceptional programming/analytical skills. He was the creator of the first professional web site about Turkey at that time. His site remained to be among the most popular and high quality sites since then. Ozgur has a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Ege University ( http://bornova.ege.edu.tr/~ceweb/), that is one of the finest colleges of Turkey in Engineering Education. His department is known as having strong ties with the industry. I had a chance to work with Ozgur more closely in the summer months of 1999. When I was the (acting) chair of the Department of Computer Engineering at Baskent University, I invited Ozgur to spend the summer at Baskent University (http://www.baskent.edu.tr/) and to participate in a research and development project funded by the Scientific and Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK, http://www.tubitak.gov.tr), a prestigious research organization similar to the National Science Foundation in the US. Ozgur has made major contributions to our project during his two-month stay in Turkey. He has quickly analyzed our problems and developed smart solutions to some of them. He has continued to interact with our group remotely even after he returned back to US. Besides the project work, he conducted two other voluntary pieces of work in the department. He has given a series of technical seminars about recent trends in Web technologies. He is very competent in these technologies thanks to his working at well-known Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, lead by Professor Geoffrey Fox. Ozgur also co-supervised a few computer undergraduates working in the development of an Internet-accessible student records automation system using Microsoft technologies. He has impressed me with his strong commitment to his work assignments and his carefully observing the given deadlines. He always take his job seriously. He is an extremely hard working and technically competent person. His problem solving approach and computer programming skills are very solid. Furthermore, he is a very mature, nice, social, and honest person and it is really a pleasure to work with him. I strongly support his application to your program. Please feel free to contact me at (+90) 532-623-3324 (mobile) or via e-mail if you have any further questions. Sincerely, Kivanc Dincer, Ph.D. Senior Research Scientist TUBITAK-UEKAE Project Office (Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey) (National Cryptography and Electronics Research Institute) Kavaklidere 06100 Ankara TURKEY kdincer@tubitak.gov.tr or kdincer@ceng.metu.edu.tr http://www.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~kdincer/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Letter for Ozgur Balsoy from Nancy McCracken --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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