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International Academic Achievement by Our Alumnus Ahmet Soylu

Our alumnus Ahmet Soylu, who earned his Bachelor’s (2006) and Master’s (2008) degrees in Computer Engineering from our University, has been appointed Dean of Kristiania University of Applied Sciences in Oslo. Soylu also continues his academic career as an Associate Professor at the University of Oslo (UiO) and a Visiting Professor at Seoul National University (SNU).

A computer scientist, professor, and academic leader specializing in data management, information representation, semantic web technologies, and AI-driven digital transformation, Soylu completed his PhD in Computer Science at KU Leuven in 2012. He has served as a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University, where he also chaired the Innovation, Digital Transformation, and Sustainability Group. In addition, he contributed as an expert in data visualization, open data, and Semantic Web technologies at the Publications Office of the European Union in Luxembourg.

Alongside his academic leadership, he has gained extensive experience in industrial and applied research as a Senior Researcher at SINTEF Digital and Senior Engineer at DNV. Soylu has led or contributed to numerous EU-funded, national, and industrial research projects, including TheyBuyForYou, which focuses on improving public procurement through open linked data, and Optique, which aims to enable scalable access to big data. His research has been published in leading academic venues such as ISWC, SIGIR, CIKM, Applied Soft Computing, Expert Systems with Applications, IEEE Computer, and the Semantic Web Journal.

Soylu also chairs the executive committee of the Declarative AI series, which includes RuleML+RR, the Reasoning Web Summer School, and DecisionCAMP, and he remains actively involved in numerous international conferences. He has repeatedly served as General Chair for RuleML+RR, organized under the Declarative AI umbrella. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Web Semantics (JoWS), Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge (TGDK), and Data Technologies and Applications.

With over 170 academic publications and more than 230 international co-authors, Ahmet Soylu continues to make significant contributions to public discussions through his articles, commentaries, and invited talks on higher education, technology, and culture.