About

Oğuz Ergin is a professor of computer engineering whose research concerns microprocessor architecture, memory systems and hardware security. He is an independent candidate for the Presidency of Turkey, running without the backing of any political party.

Research

His work sits in computer architecture: the design of the processor itself. Recurring themes are register file and datapath optimisation, narrow-width values, energy efficiency, fault tolerance, and the security of DRAM memory. He completed his doctorate at Binghamton University with a thesis on register file optimisations for superscalar microprocessors, and has published in the principal venues of the field, including ISCA, MICRO, HPCA and DSN.

He founded and continues to lead the Kasırga Microprocessor Laboratory at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara, a laboratory built around undergraduate and graduate students designing processors from the register transfer level upward. Teams from the laboratory have won first place at TEKNOFEST, Turkey's national technology competition, five times, including four consecutive years.

Between 2017 and 2019 he served as research and development consultant to ASELSAN on the design of the processor core for Turkey's national microprocessor programme, and between 2019 and 2022 as avionics research consultant to Turkish Aerospace Industries.

Positions

• University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Professor of Computer Engineering, since 2024.
• TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara. Professor since 2018. Chair of the Department of Computer Engineering from 2016 to 2024, eight years. Founding Chair of the Department of Artificial Intelligence Engineering, 2019 to 2020. Advisor to the Rector for strategic planning, 2015 to 2024.
• ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Visiting Professor, 2023.
• University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Research Fellow, 2015 to 2016.
• University of Notre Dame, United States. Visiting Associate Professor, 2014.
• Intel Barcelona Research Centre, Spain. Senior Research Scientist, 2004 to 2005.

Education

• PhD and MSc, Binghamton University (State University of New York), United States. Doctoral thesis: Register File Optimizations for Superscalar Microprocessors.
• BSc, Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

Public work

He writes and teaches in Turkish for a general audience. His YouTube channel carries over 960 hours of recorded lectures and discussions on computer architecture, semiconductors and technology policy, in Turkish. He has written three books, two of them released under open access, including a textbook on computer architecture based on the RISC-V instruction set, written in Turkish so that students are not obliged to learn the subject in a second language first.

The campaign has also built an open archive of its own material: a chatbot built on the transcripts of those recorded talks, several open data projects, and the redacted case files of the legal proceedings described on the legal case page.

Why he is standing

His argument is that Turkey's political debate has been circling the same disputes for decades while the decisions that will determine the country's position in the coming century, in computing, energy, education and industrial capacity, go unmade. He proposes to govern by measurable commitments rather than slogans: a programme of ten headings, each with a defined target that can be checked against the record.

He is not a member of any political party, and the campaign is funded by no party organisation. The full programme is published in Turkish at oguzergin.net.