Update:  I have now moved to the  AI and Data team, and work on using LLMs and automated reasoning to write more effective, correct programs.

I am a principal applied scientist at the Automated Reasoning Group at Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3-ARG). I took a founding role in the first Automated Reasoning (AR) Group at AWS, first leading a team working on the "security of the cloud" (focusing on AWS internals). This team evolved into one developing tools and collaborating with teams in IoT, cryptography, Identity and Access Management, and S3 to integrate our tools into their design and implementation processes.  I started S3-ARG, S3's dedicated AR team in 2020.  S3-ARG works  on all aspects of  correctness and durability for  S3,  an extremely complex and large distributed system. (We are hiring!)  See this talk on our work on  S3 strong consistency and the coverage of our work in Peter DeSantis's re:Invent 2021 keynote.

My current technical interests are in model-based testing of web service APIs and checking conformance of code implementing distributed systems to design models. Bridging implementations and models/specifications in this manner increases confidence in the correctness of implementations and provides a mechanism for code and models to remain in sync. Throughout my career, I have focused on concurrent systems implemented in hardware and/or software. I have both developed static, compositional proof methods and worked on dynamic/runtime techniques (including supporting a proposed DataRaceException in Java). At S3-ARG, we are developing and deploying a wide variety of automated reasoning methods that help us strike the compromises between ease-of-use/automation and degree of assurance we need for each application.

I received my MS and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1995 and 1998 respectively. 1998-2000, I was a research scientist at the Gigascale Systems Research Center. From 2000-2003, I was a research scientist at the DEC/Compaq/HP Systems Research Center (SRC). 2003-2016, I was a professor at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. While at Koç University, I collaborated closely with (and was funded by) Microsoft Research, and had visiting appointments at Microsoft Research (Redmond, Cambridge, Bangalore), Univ. Paris VI, Univ. Paris VII, MIT, and EPFL. I am a Distinguished Research Fellow at Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey, and on the advisory board for computer engineering at Koc University.  See here for my resume.