Ali Selim Aytuna

A pro bono mentoring initiative for product management, engineering, as well as coaching on leadership, company culture and team scaling.

Perzonalization is an AI-powered predictive personalization engine for e-commerce. It boosts store revenues up to 15% by learning shoppers' individual shopping tastes and delivering a personalized shopping experience. I lead our suite of products all the way from customer discovery to product-market fit and growth. Under the hood is a core, proprietary machine learning module and the real-time micro-segmentation engine that I am the architect of.

I assembled and led a team of cross-functional and distributed teams of engineers, designers, data scientists, academic and technical advisors. Then, securing two rounds of R&D grants, I architected and managed building of our core technology: a proprietary machine learning module and the real-time micro-segmentation engine. Each day, it analyzes 82 million shopper activities and delivers 25 million personalized recommendations, within a set of 900 thousand active products.

We were accepted to Fit Startup Acceleration Program 2012 Winter cohort, where we pivoted 2 times that lead to foundation of ShopKrowd.

Spearheaded the creation of a Nokia (later Windows Phone) mobile app ecosystem in Turkey from scratch, via strategic partnerships and technology evangelism. Executed over 50 partnerships with top brands across various verticals to ensure delivery of 250 key apps to store, built mindshare by crafting 40 reciprocal marketing programs and generating an earned media (ATL+BTL) value of 10M USD, placed the Turkish Nokia Store in #1 position in Europe and #3 position globally in terms of daily downloads.

As the first and globally certified FedEx Solution Partner in Turkey, I architected and managed development of Paketim.com, a smart shipping SaaS product tailored for international shipment needs of SMEs. Along with basvurum.com, it was one of the pioneering SaaS services in Turkey. It was the first international shipment service in Turkey to introduce 'first-in-the-market' features.

As the first and globally certified FedEx Solution Partner in Turkey, I architected and managed development basvurum.com / ship2apply.com; a smart shipping SaaS product tailored for international shipment needs of students applying to graduate schools. We addressed the unmet problem of high cost for students who applied to multiple universities by introducing a dynamic pricing scheme.

Led the technical team of the largest digital signage project in Turkey (1350 clients, 3 servers) developed for Turk Telekom. Developed software in a team that built a novel multimedia-enabled public pay phone project for Turk Telekom, named TT Nokta (1000 clients, 5 servers). This project was TTGV 8. Turkish Technology Awards finalist.

Developed a novel distributed algorithm on a 32-node Beowulf cluster for prediction of Protein-Protein Interactions, now serving as an online service for global proteomics community (PRISM) [cosbi.ku.edu.tr/prism/]. Published 1 book (available at Amazon), 2 articles at Oxford University Press, with 450+ citations (see publications section). Presented at ISMB/ECCB 2004 Conference.

Thesis on Bioinformatics / Computational Biology. Awarded fellowship. Published 1 book (available at Amazon), 2 articles at Oxford University Press, with 450+ citations (see publications section). One article received TÜBİTAK Scientific Publication Incentive Award. Both are listed within the top 20 references in Wikipedia under "Protein–Protein Interaction Prediction" topic. ResearchGate profile: [bit.ly/369un0j] Book: [amzn.to/1A5G7NB] Article 1: [bit.ly/3mpT4uU] Article 2: [bit.ly/39jKFFV]

Concentration Area: Computers In a team of five students, I managed the hardware and software design and implementation of a robot that follows a specified person, avoiding obstacles on the way.