👨 Mert Kosan, 1995 model.
🇹🇷 Grew up in Yalova. I moved to Istanbul for my undergraduate education. I had lived in Istanbul until I moved to Santa Barbara, CA for a Ph.D. I now live in Austin, TX.
👔 Working at Visa Inc. as a Staff Machine Learning Scientist. I design and build large-scale machine learning systems — self-supervised transformers, Large Transactional Models, and GenAI-powered explainability tools — for real-time fraud detection, scam detection, and risk modeling, protecting billions of transactions worldwide.
🎓 Obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Santa Barbara, supervised by Prof. Ambuj Singh at Dynamo Lab. My dissertation, Transparent Representation Learning for Graphs and Human-AI Collaboration, focused on explainability and representation learning for graph machine learning; my broader research interests also include anomaly detection. Two papers came out of this work: GCFExplainer, selected among the Top 10 papers at WSDM 2023 and awarded Best Paper at MLoG-WSDM 2023, and GNNX-Bench, a comprehensive benchmarking study of graph neural network explainers published at ICLR 2024.
🎓 Obtained my BSc in Computer Science from Sabanci University, Turkey. I worked on Graph based Recommendation Systems, supervised by Prof. Yucel Saygin, for my bachelor graduation project. I ranked 1st in Computer Science department.
📄 My work has been published at KDD, ICLR, AAAI, and WSDM, with 250+ citations and an h-index of 7. I hold three patents in machine learning for fraud detection and anomaly analysis, and I serve as an Area Chair for KDD’s Dataset and Benchmark Track.
🧠 Result oriented, responsible, and hardworking are three adjectives that describe how I work. I pick things up quickly, and I’ve picked up a fair amount of teaching experience along the way — I enjoy mentoring junior scientists and engineers just as much as I enjoy the research itself.
💪⚽ I like staying active — I try to 🏊 swim or 🏃 run everyday, and I enjoy playing and watching ⚽ football with friends. I’m a huge fan of 🦁 Galatasaray and Barcelona, and Leo Messi is my favourite.
🎮 I mostly like RPG or Simulation Games. My favorites are 👹 Diablo, ⚽ Football Manager, and Pokémon.
Contact
📧 mertkosan@gmail.com