Our Team

Alper Turgut

Alper is a serial technology entrepreneur and business development executive. In his most recent venture, Verkata LLC, Alper led the product vision and brought marquee customers (e.g., Motorola, British Telecom, AOL, Virgin Mobile) on board carrying company to profitability merely in two years. Previously he co-founded Aligo Inc., raised over $24 million from venture funds and strategic partners including Motorola, Inc., as a strategic investor. His venture was featured in Newsweek Special Edition, and received numerous prestigious awards such as Red Herring Magazine's "Most Likely to Succeed" Award, "Wireless Ventures Awards" (two years in a row), Java Developers Journal "Blue Ribbon" and "Best Product" Awards.

Alper led customer acquisition efforts focusing on multi-million strategic accounts and OEM deals. He closed flagship software licensing deals with Sun Microsystems, Motorola and Nextel. Alper pioneered international expansions and opened up offices in Japan closing major distribution deals with NTI (joint venture between NTT and Itochu), Kanematsu Communications, and Fuji Electric.

Previously, Alper was a strategic management consultant with McKinsey and Company in New York focusing on e-business software strategy and financial services working with Fortune 500 companies. Alper received his MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management concentrating on strategic management and finance. He holds a Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications from Northeastern University and graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey.

Ismail Haritaoglu, Ph.D.

Ismail is one the leading experts in computer vision research, machine learning and mobile applications. Ismail leads the technological research and product development.

Prior to Anvato, Ismail was as a chief scientist leading ground-breaking machine vision and video surveillance research for the US Defense Agency and the US Military. Previously, Ismail was a research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California where he invented and architected, InfoScope - a networked mobile imaging solution for language translation. InfoScope was recognized worldwide; it won numerous awards including "Best Invention of 2002" by the Time Magazine.

At University of Maryland, College Park, Ismail developed one of the first end-to-end real-time surveillance systems, called W4. W4 became the famous pioneering research prototype that powers the world's leading surveillance systems including IBM's Video CRM. Ismail published numerous journal and conference papers that act as the foundation of machine vision. Ismail holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park and MS and BS from Bilkent University, Turkey.

Mehmet Altinel, Ph.D.

Mehmet spearheads Anvato's advertising infrastructure and data analysis back-end. Mehmet is one of the leading experts on large scale data access and processing. He joined Anvato from IBM Research, where he innovated, architected and delivered pioneering technologies, shaping future directions of IBM's Information Management products. At IBM, he was the founding member and technical lead in the DAMIA (DAta Mashup Fabric for Intranet Applications) project, which became the centerpiece of recently announced InfoSphere MashupHub product. He also architected the DBCache prototype, which allows dynamic caching of partial content from backend databases. Prior to IBM, Mehmet was a senior member of the technical staff at Hughes Network systems. Before that, he was a Research Scientist at computer science department, University of Maryland. Mehmet holds a Ph.D., M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from the Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey. He has published numerous papers and journal articles on information management area in prominent database conferences and other venues.

Oztan Harmanci, Ph.D.

Oztan leads Anvato's content identification and digital video processing efforts. His expertise lies in digital video compression, processing and communications.

Prior to Anvato, Oztan was with DoCoMo USA Labs where he developed next generation video compression methods and peer assisted video streaming technologies. He has developed video compression and watermarking methods for MPEG4 simple profile and H.264 baseline profile video codecs over error prone communication channels. He also invented a method for low bitrate digital video watermarking. Oztan holds a Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, and M.S. from Georgia Institute of Technology and B.S. from Bilkent University, Turkey.