Summer Events 2021

This seminar seeks to explain the rapidly changing regime dynamics in the Turkish context. In particular, it analyzes how the democratic regime broke down in Turkey and whether the current presidential system can get consolidated.

Universities worldwide typically expect faculty members, and increasingly their advanced students, to publish their research and develop a publication record.  But why do we publish?  In what forms and contexts do we publish?  What is different about writing for publication genres?  What does the publication process look like?  In addition to discussing these preliminary questions, this seminar will highlight considerations and habits that can enable publishing success.  Journal article sections will also serve as examples to demonstrate how we can develop our genre knowledge to produce our own manuscripts for publication.

Energy and its resources are one of the most debated issues today. In this seminar we will try to find out answers to the following questions: Will renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydrogen be able to solve the energy problems of the future through the development of technology and material science? Can new metal/non-metal mines be discovered? Is nuclear energy a solution for energy demands? Why is lithium ion so important? Can we recharge our mobile phone while we are doing sports? Can we generate electricity from tears? Can electric cars compete in Formula 1 tracks? How small can a single transistor be and why do we need quantum computers? In this Future Seminar called "Social Impact of Renewable Energy Technologies", we will look for an answer to all these questions and try to figure out the impacts of such energy technologies on society.

We are living in a data-rich world, and our experiences leave digital footprints on various systems. Online conversations, wellness devices, content produced in different forms provides valuable information to study individual behaviors and population dynamics. Using computational techniques and available information, we can study important societal problems, address existing theories and hypotheses using data-driven approaches, and provide policy making recommendations. In this talk, I will present two studies both observe online social media but address different problems: manipulation of online conversations and characterization of minute-level emotional dynamics. Both of these studies involve studying human behavior using tools of network science and machine learning. I want to share how knowledge in different disciplines is fundamental to design the research questions and interpret the outcomes.

Bio: Dr. Onur Varol is an Assistant Professor at the Sabanci University Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences and Principal Investigator at the VIRAL Lab. His research focuses on developing techniques to analyze online behaviors to improve individual well-being and address societal problems using online data. Prior to joining Sabanci University, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University at the Center for Complex Network Research. He completed his PhD in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA). His thesis focuses on the analysis of manipulation and threats on social media and he was awarded the 2018 University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award. He has developed a system called Botometer to detect social bots on Twitter and his team ranked top 3 worldwide at the 2015 DARPA Bot Detection Challenge. Efforts on studying social bots yield publications on prestigious venues such as International Conference of Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Nature Communications, World Wide Web (WWW) conference, and Communications of the ACM

Many countries around the world are struggling with water scarcity and more of them are expected to encounter the same problem in coming years. This is mainly due to the fact that 70% of the global freshwater resources are used in agriculture. Therefore, water conservation is a critical issue, not only for the agricultural sector but also for the future sustainable food supply mechanisms. On the other hand, during the last 30 years, food production has increased by more than 100%; and FAO estimates that about 60% more food will be needed by 2050 to meet the food requirements of a growing global population. Fertilizers and pesticides are the necessary evils of farming, which maintain nutrients in soil, and fight pests; but conventional practices adopted in use excessive amounts of agrochemicals. Therefore, agriculture is one of the biggest polluters of water. To overcome the issues of excessive use of agrochemicals and natural resources, nanotechnology has a lot to offer ranging from controlled release active ingredient formulations to smart farming. Nowadays, the interest of using nanotechnology in agriculture focuses on specific applications including nanofertilizers and nanopesticides to trail products and nutrients levels to increase the productivity without decontamination of natural resources and soil health. This seminar is focused on the use of nanotechnology in agriculture sector and its adaptation to the next generation Agriculture 4.0 practices. Case studies on implementation of nanotechnology into agriculture will be discussed with their journey from lab to market pathways.