While studying for his master’s in computer science, Doga Tekin made the decision to join Oracle Labs as a research intern. He has since graduated with flying colors and moved to Zurich to work at Oracle Labs full-time. Now, in addition to finding new ways to fight financial crime with machine learning, he’s working on applying machine learning in other domains that can help Oracle and its customers. Read on to learn about his fascinating research and discover why he thinks Oracle Labs is the ultimate choice for an impactful internship.
His curiosity is kindled
Doga hails from Turkey, which is where he studied for his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering at Bilkent University. After realizing he was more interested in software development than electronics, he moved to Switzerland to complete his master’s in computer science. It was here that his love of AI and machine learning was first ignited. A passionate and ambitious student, he knew there were two key things he wanted from an internship: compelling research and real-life use cases.
“Oracle Labs had the most projects that fit both these criteria at the same time,” he says. “I went to an event on campus where I met some Oracle Labs employees, who told me about all the fascinating research projects they were conducting, so I applied to write my master’s thesis with them. After a few interviews and project discussions, I started working on a natural language processing research project that aimed to help investigators by letting them analyze their data in new ways.”
Putting data to work
Specifically, Doga’s research project focused on transforming text documents into knowledge graphs, which in turn opens the door to many other exciting applications. “It allows analyzing text resources in a completely new and visual way and at the same time enables further processing by useful graph algorithms and technologies,” he enthuses. “I’m particularly proud of this project because I was able to conduct research on the latest natural language processing methods and build a model pipeline to achieve state-of-the-art results.”
His research is now being integrated into the Oracle Financial Services Crime and Compliance Studio, an advanced analytics application which aids anti-money laundering and anti-financial crime programs using artificial intelligence, machine learning, graph analytics and data management. “The machine learning research I did during my internship will help financial investigators by letting them analyze their text resources in powerful new ways,” he explains.
Turning ideas into reality
Doga was given the autonomy to drive his own research and he feels that this is what really motivated him to break new ground. “I felt empowered to innovate throughout my internship both technically and intellectually,” he shares. “Technically, having access to relevant research sources and strong computational resources were important factors in being able to experiment with new ideas. Intellectually, the freedom to conduct my own research in my project and encouragement from my supervisors to try new things were big factors, along with the ability to brainstorm and get feedback from many people on the team.”
This depth and breadth of exposure resulted in rapid growth for Doga and and he shows no signs of slowing down now that he’s a full-time member of technical staff. “Simply having the opportunity to work on a variety of projects has already helped me develop my research and engineering skills tremendously,” he says. “I’ve gained expertise in the popular fields of machine learning and learned to contribute to the development of very large production codebases. The organizational structure means I get to interact with many teams, so I am also constantly developing my teamworking skills. I’m also looking forward to making better use of the tons of learning material Oracle employees have access to.”
Teamwork makes the dream work
Speaking of which, how did he find balancing his work at Oracle Labs with his studies? “My internship project was also my master’s thesis, so my college work and my internship was mostly the same,” he explains. “My supervisors at Oracle Labs were so supportive throughout the process, they did their best to make sure the work I was doing for Labs would also be useful in my thesis, whenever possible. They were also very understanding in allowing me to take the necessary time to write my thesis and helped me by reviewing it.”
According to Doga, this is a great example of the culture at Oracle Labs. It’s an inclusive place where everyone succeeds together. “Hard-working and collaborative are the two adjectives that seem most fitting,” Doga agrees. “Everyone believes in the impact of Oracle’s technologies and does their best to ensure we succeed! There’s a strong focus on collaboration, ranging from weekly meetings where people from different teams can give feedback to each other, to intercontinental collaborations and company-wide machine learning summits.”
Calling all curious interns
Doga lights up as he talks about his plans for the future. The most rewarding part of it all is that he feels his work is moving the world forward. “I think the sheer scale of Oracle makes the work of Oracle Labs very exciting,” he says. “Knowing that so many customers and products use Oracle’s technology every day gives a lot of weight and importance to the research we do here.”
As a final piece of advice to students who are on the lookout for the right internship, Doga offers this: “This is a unique opportunity to work on real problems, collaborate with very smart researchers and engineers, see how research is conducted at a world-class company and how that research is successfully integrated into impactful products.”
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