Irem Ergun, Machine Learning Engineer

Irem Ergum is a Machine learning engineer with a background in MS, Computer Science. She has more than 6 years of experience in machine learning, and is a part of the conversational AI team developing LLMs at Cohere.

Irem Ergum is an accomplished machine-learning professional in the technology field. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Having 4.5+ years of research expertise, and also is a teaching assistant. 

She is passionate about creating state-of-the-art machine learning systems and is knowledgeable in developing and maintaining machine learning workflows(MLOps).

Before starting her Ph.D., she worked in the technology industry for a while. She has three years of expertise in software engineering and system design.

Her two papers were recognized, out of which one is on Secure Aggregation for Privacy-Aware Federated Learning with Limited Resources, which was accepted at the ICLR Socially Responsible ML Workshop 2022.

This project proposes a light version of secure aggregation protocol for private federations by reducing communication overhead up to 10 times per round.

Using genome data, she developed semi-supervised learning approaches for detecting specific types of breast cancer. The project had been selected as the semester’s finest undergraduate research project.

A few of her machine learning projects and other research are a text generator built using LSTMs, a face generator using GANs, and music genre prediction using CNNs.

Her interest in technology persuaded her to start a blog named 2cute2tech, an inclusive space for professionals to create educational content.

Education

• University of California, Riverside, Master of Science- MS, Computer Science(Sep 2018- Dec 2022)
• Udacity, Nano Degree, Natural Language Processing (Sep2022-Oct 2022)
• University of California, Riverside, Ph.D., Candidate(C.Phil.), Computer Science (Sep 2020-Oct 2022)
• Udacity, Nano degree, Deep learning (Apr 2022-Jun 2022)
• Bilkent University, Bachelors Degree, Computer Science ( 2013-2017)
• Ankara Ataturk Lisesi, High School Diploma( Sep 2009- Jun2013)

Work Experience

• Machine Learning Engineer at Cohere, Riverside, California, United States (Jan 2023 – Present )
• Graduate Student Researcher at the University of California, Riverside (Sep 2018 – Dec 2022 )
• Global Teaching Fellow Internship at Delta Analytics (May 2021 – Sep 2021)
• Software Engineer at Comodo, Ankara, Turkey (Oct 2017 – Mar 2018)
• Software Engineer at OpsGenie, Ankara, Turkey (Jul 2017 – Oct 2017)

Projects

• Secure aggregation for privacy-aware federated learning with limited resources (May 2021 – Feb 2022)

• Sparsified secure aggregation for privacy-preserving federated learning (Apr 2021 – Dec 2021)

• Understanding/Detecting Microaggressions in Turkish (May 2021 – Sep 2021) 

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