In the Spotlight: Duygu Buyukaydin

As part of our Women in AI IN THE SPOTLIGHT series we had the pleasure to talk to Duygu Buyukaydin.

Please tell us about yourself, touching on your professional experience.

I am 41 years old women, mother to a 7 year old boy and married for 12 years. I worked in a defense company for 15 years as software and algorithm developer. After that I worked as Data Scientist in Philips Medical systems, developing deep learning based diagnosis algorithms. Later, I moved to Thermo Fisher Scientific Service Innovation where I am responsible for AI bases solutions. I am a member of TFS Women's Empowerment Group. In personal life, my passion is fitness, well-being and reading.

Tell us why your work should be honored and celebrated?

I am Lead Engineer for Algorithms and Data Science in Service Innovation for Electron Microscopes which are really complex and advanced machines.

Service department used to be a break&fix organization no more than 10 years ago. Using the power of data we changed the way we serve our customers. I am responsible for exploiting AI in our service solutions. I make certain that we understand failure before it happens, create actionable insights to make our customers’ life easier.

Other significant challenge that I have is the productization of our AI based solutions. I am managing??the MLOps activities to make sure that we have an efficient, sustainable operating ML development&productization?pipeline. I am also responsible for internal AI based solutions to create efficiency throughout the organization. Moreover I am responsible for AI innovation activities for upcoming horizons which I cannot disclose due to company confidentiality rules.

Great, we are super excited to share your story. So, being a woman in AI is challenging. Can you share how you cope with situations related to that?

The most important thing for me is the awareness. If I can identify certain situations as challenge, then I can take actions as well. My biggest support in this is Women's Empowerment Group. We discuss the challenges and the most constructive ways to handle them. I feel that as women we need to raise awareness in community to show that women are also a player in the field.

Moreover I take part, and encourage my female colleagues to take part in the AI/ML related events as much as possible. For example I was a keynote speaker in WIDS 2022.

What are the three core competencies (skills) that others should focus on, to be successful in your field?

• Python coding skills.
• Deep Learning Architectures.
• MLOps.

Do you have any tips and tricks on how to develop more in-depth AI knowledge?

If you are in AI there is no ending in learning. You should always be curious. There are a lot of free tools and datasets.?Hands on experience is best way to learn. If you want to excel just start with a "Hello World" type of application. If you want to dig deeper kaggle competitions are really nice opportunities. Depending on the area that you want to develop get online trainings and gain theoretical knowledge. There are tons of material online. One can follow the AI/ML pages of the tech companies like Google or AWS. There are publishing really nice whitepapers with condensed information. If you need help on strategy follow the podcasts like "McKinsey on AI" and "Accenture AI Leaders".

What is your perspective on the role of AI in the future of business?

AI is disruptive for business like it is for other fields. If you are not using data-driven insights right now you will need to do so in following 10 years otherwise you will be out. AI is a crucial tool to understand the factors causing traction, business opportunities. Moreover it provides efficiency and cost savings if you play it smart. So in future you either use AI in your business or you will fail.

The current economic state has an immense impact not only on AI and digital development in corporate environments, but also on scaleups and startups. What different practices do you use for your own business or the company you work for?

We are using AI in providing service solutions for customers. They want to know if a problem is going to happen before it happens and AI is a great enabler for that. Since I am working in a big corporate company there are a lot of use cases ranging from automatization, creating business insights, computer vision.