[Nomination] Efe Kaan Güler #178
Description
Select one:
- I am nominating myself for the PyTorch Ambassador Program.
- I am nominating someone else to become a PyTorch Ambassador.
Please confirm that the nominee meets the following requirements:
- The nominee is 18 years of age or older.
- The nominee agrees to abide by the PyTorch Code of Conduct.
- The nominee agrees to comply with the Linux Foundation Antitrust Policy.
- The nominee meets at least one of the qualifications listed in the PyTorch Ambassador Program Requirements.
Nominee Name
Efe Kaan Güler
Nominee Email
Nominee's GitHub or GitLab Handle
efekaanguler
(Optional) Organization / Affiliation
Google Developer Groups on Campus METU / Center for Robotics and AI METU
City, State/Province, Country
Ankara, Türkiye
Your Name
No response
Your Email (Optional)
No response
How has the nominee contributed to PyTorch?
- An active contributor to PyTorch repositories (e.g., commits, PRs, discussions).
- A speaker at PyTorch events or workshops.
- A PyTorch user group organizer or meetup host.
- A researcher or educator using PyTorch in academic work or training.
- An active leader in the PyTorch community with at least one year of experience in:
- Organizing events (virtual/in-person).
- Speaking at AI/ML conferences.
- Mentoring others in PyTorch.
- Creating technical content (e.g., blogs, videos, tutorials).
🏆 How Would the Nominee Contribute as an Ambassador?
As a PyTorch Ambassador, I aim to expand PyTorch adoption, education, and innovation across Turkish universities and developer communities. My contributions will focus on scalable education, mentorship, and open-source collaboration. Specifically, I will:
I currently serve as the President of Google Developer Groups on Campus at METU, the most active AI student community in Turkey’s leading technical university. In the Fall 2025 semester, I will organize a comprehensive AI/ML training series targeted at students interested in machine learning. Last year, this program attracted over 250 participants, with 122 successfully completing the course and receiving certification. Among them, 30 students were selected to join applied AI project teams. This year’s training will go beyond fundamentals and mathematical intuition by also integrating practical implementation through PyTorch. This will cultivate a new generation of highly capable students trained in PyTorch and deep learning. The Ambassador title will help increase the visibility and credibility of this training initiative.
1 - As in the previous year (materials from last year: https://github.com/GDG-on-Campus-METU/ai-ml-materials), all educational content will be released as open-source, allowing other institutions and individual learners to benefit freely. This will promote wider access to high-quality AI education and directly support the growth of the PyTorch community.
2 - Students trained through GDG METU benefit from hands-on mentorship that supports both their learning journey and their project development. As a PyTorch Ambassador, I—alongside the AI/ML coordinators within our community—will continue offering one-on-one mentorship throughout the year, helping nurture a new generation of technically proficient PyTorch users and AI developers.
3 - I will collaborate with GDG communities in other universities to organize joint events, and I will be able to represent the PyTorch community as a speaker or workshop host at these campuses. This will expand PyTorch’s presence in the national student ecosystem.
4 - PyTorch is the primary framework used in most of our community's AI/ML projects, and we will continue to build on it. This ensures that students graduate with hands-on experience in PyTorch and reinforces the framework’s ecosystem within Turkey’s academic and student research environments.
Ultimately, my motivation for becoming a PyTorch Ambassador is to strengthen the recognition of a tool we already actively use, while building a sustainable pipeline that spans from education to applied research—all centered around PyTorch.Any additional details you'd like to share?
I bring strong academic depth and practical experience to the ambassador role. As an undergraduate researcher at ROMER, the Center for Robotics and AI at METU, I am actively working on two PyTorch-based research directions:
1 - Transformation-invariant point cloud representation learning using PyTorch3D, focusing on building robust 3D encoders for robotic perception.
2 - Similarity learning across heterogeneous data types using CorrNet, with an emphasis on modeling incompleteness and incorrectness in multi-modal representations.
Beyond research, I lead several PyTorch-based applied AI projects through GDG METU:
1 - Alaz: A full-stack autonomous driving platform using object detection, semantic segmentation, and classical planning. (ongoing, no repo available publicly yet, but it will)
2 - Hector-Metubot: A campus-wide retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbot built with PyTorch-based NLP models. (https://github.com/gdgc-metu-aiml/metubot)
3 - Baksi: A CNN-powered medical imaging AI system designed to detect early indicators of stroke from brain scans. (https://github.com/efekaanguler/baksi)
4 - ANZU: An autonomous UAV platform leveraging PyTorch for onboard computer vision and navigation tasks. (github.com/HUmutI/ANZU)
All educational and project materials—including lecture slides, coding notebooks, and documentation—are published in English, open-source, and designed to be modular and reusable. This ensures their value beyond our university and supports collaboration across communities.
I am also actively mentoring a new generation of PyTorch users within my community. Many of our past trainees are now leading their own sub-projects and mentoring others in return, creating a self-sustaining talent pipeline.
GitHub: https://github.com/efekaanguler
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/efekaanguler/