Faculty members and students from the Department of Computer Engineering represented Bilkent University at the Computational Genomics Summer Institute 2025 (CGSI), hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
The month-long program, held annually since 2016, brings together international faculty, postdocs, and students to foster collaboration and create advanced training opportunities. The Bilkent team included Can Alkan and Ercüment Çiçek, a graduate student, Ahmet Arda Ceylan from the CS department, and an undergraduate researcher, Zeynep Akçil from the EEE department. They were also joined by Bilkent alumnus Gürkan Bebek (B.Sc. CS, 2001).
Dr. Alkan gave an overview of his group’s work on accelerating read mapping through hardware/algorithm co-design, while Dr. Çiçek delivered a tutorial on privacy challenges in genomic data sharing. Student research was also prominently featured: Ahmet Arda Ceylan, who works with Dr. Çiçek, presented LYCEUM, an algorithm to characterize copy number variation in ancient DNA. Zeynep Akçil, who conducts her research with Dr. Alkan, presented POACHA, her work on Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) design for partial order alignments.
