Gumusalan and Koc win doctoral fellowships in computer science

Basar Koc, left, and Arda Gumasalan

Two seniors who are international students from Turkey, Arda Gumusalan and Basar Koc, were recently accepted into doctoral programs in Computer Science at George Mason University, D.C. and University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, respectively.  Both have been offered $60,000 fellowships for tuition and living costs. Gumusalan and Koc will graduate in May with dual degrees from SUNY Fredonia and Ege University, Turkey.

During his three years at SUNY Fredonia, Koc has achieved several scholarly distinctions. He has co-authored four conference papers with Dr. Ziya Arnavut, professor for Computer and Information Science Department, since 2011. Recently, Koc published "A Modified Pseudo-distance Technique for Lossless Compression on Color-Mapped Images" at the IEEE Data Compression Conference in April. His previous work, titled “Block-sorting Transformations with Pseudo-distance Technique for Lossless Compression of Color-mapped Images”, was presented at the 6th IEEE International Conference on System of systems Engineering (SOSE) in Albuquerque, New Mexico in June 2011. This paper was also awarded the “Best Paper Award” at the WNY Image Processing Workshop at the University of Rochester in November 2011.

Under the supervision of Dr. Arnavut, Gumusalan recently finished and submitted for publication his undergraduate thesis, titled “EEG Signal compression” to the 34th IEEE International Conference on Engineering in Medicine and Biology. He is expected to be presenting the paper at the event in Orlando, Florida, in August.

Both students attended SUNY Fredonia through the Dual Diploma agreement with Ege University in Turkey, which involves students majoring in either computer science or international relations. The programs allow students to experience two distinctively different cultures, which prepares them well for work in a multicultural environment and to function effectively in an international arena.