Istanbul · currently curious

Hello, I’m Onur Güngör.

I move between language, machines, people, and whatever refuses to fit in a spreadsheet.

Explore my work

MAKE IMAGES✦TEACH TRANSFORMERS✦WRITE CODE✦ASK RESEARCH QUESTIONS✦EXPLAIN SCIENCE✦

01 / Five worlds

Areas of practice

These are not separate careers. They leak into each other—in useful ways.

Artist

Images, accidents, and visual ideas that begin before words do.

Looking sideways

Lecturer

Graduate-level NLP, taught as a living conversation rather than a finished map.

See teaching

Programmer

Twenty-plus years of persuading computers to do useful—and occasionally beautiful—things.

Browse the code

Scholar

Natural language processing for languages that refuse to behave like English.

Read the papers

Science writer

AI and computation, minus the fog machine. Ideas for curious people, in plain language.

Start reading

02 / Selected threads

Selected work

The work changes shape—paper, software, classroom, essay—but the questions have a habit of returning.

A Language × machines How do computers understand a language with more moving parts? B Explanation × trust A model made a prediction. Fine. But why that prediction? C Research × making Can an idea survive contact with actual working code?

03 / Writing in public

Essays and notes

I write about computing, intelligence, and the odd ways people and machines misunderstand one another.

Curiosity / 5 min

26 Sheep, 10 Goats, and ChatGPT

When a nonsense question reveals something real about the way we reason.

Read the essay Programming / 3 min

Is Programming Dead?

Interfaces evolve. Data changes the method. The programmer, inconveniently, remains.

Read the essay Notes / ongoing

Field Notes from the AI Weather

Short observations on models, data, work, and whatever became strange this week.

Read on LinkedIn

04 / About

Background

I’m Onur, an Istanbul-based computer scientist who never learned to keep disciplines in their assigned rooms.

I lead data science work around understanding course content at Udemy and teach transformer-based pre-training at Boğaziçi University. My research lives in natural language processing—especially morphologically rich languages, explainability, and Turkish.

The rest of the time, I make art, write for humans, and follow ideas across borders that looked sensible only from far away.

Home base: Istanbul
Research base: Boğaziçi University
Industry: Data Science at Udemy
Academic degrees: BS · MS · PhD, Computer Engineering
Recurring obsession: How language carries meaning

05 / Contact

Get in touch

onurgu@boun.edu.tr

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