Projects

Fantasy Elections 2024

This is an English demo of a web application I have built for Turkish users to predict, visualize and share March 2024 Turkish local election results. The original application was accessed from here, was in Turkish and had an authentication with google account. Since the elections are now over, only the demo version is live for my portfolio. In this application, users can interact with a map containing all provinces of Turkey. When they click on a province, all candidates running in that province are shown, and users can select their predicted winner. Users can then print their predictions on maps automatically generated for them with party colors and logos, and share these prediction maps on social media. They can also compete against each other in the leaderboard. I have built both the front and back-end of the app using python shiny. The application is hosted on an AWS EC2 server I have prepared, where a new docker container is started for each visiting user. The application connects to a PostgreSQL database, again hosted on AWS, where user predictions, candidate and party info are stored. The project allowed me to improve my web development and SQL skills.

NEWTON – Numeric Event generator in Water for Tens Of MeV Neutrinos

A neutrino event generator I have made mainly for electron neutrino (anti-electron neutrino) interactions on oxygen nuclei for neutrino energies about 0 to 125 MeV. Incoming neutrino flux and detector properties (mass, material, duration) can be specified with card files. The generator will then calculate number of neutrino interactions and for each interaction it will generate output particles with energy and direction information. Secondary particles that are nuclear de-excitation products will also be generated via TALYS interface.

TANGRAM: Unbinned ML Fitter

An unbinned maximum likelihood fitter in the presence of many nuisance parameters utilizing the pull method. I developed this code for my electron-neutrino oxygen cross section measurement in Super-Kamiokande. The fit template distributions are regenerated with weighted Kernel Density Estimation at every step of the minimization process, where weights are controlled by the nuisance parameters. The code supports mock data generation for toy Monte Carlo studies. It includes shell scripts to run many jobs in parallel.

Simulation and Analysis Tools For METU-DBL Particle Detectors

METU-DBL (Middle East Technical University – Defocusing BeamLine) is a specialized test setup built in Ankara, Turkey in a TAEK (Turkish Atomic Energy Agency). It tests electrical equipment that will be part of satellites under space radiation conditions (with protons), which will cause failures in conventional electronics. Before testing the equipments, different particle detectors scan the test position to measure proton flux and uniformity. I have prepared simulation and analysis software in MATLAB to ensure two detectors (called Timepix and Diamond Detector) can measure the proton flux and its properties correctly.

MCMC in C++ For 3D Ising Model and Scalar Lattice QFT

A fast Markov Chain Monte Carlo that can study the properties of a few interesting physical systems to statistical mechanics and quantum filed theory. Both systems compose of points in a lattice which interacts with their neighbors in a specific way. From that interactions, interesting behaviors emerge that can be simulated and studied with this code. It is built in C++ and utilizes a data structure inspired by linked lists and graphs, in which each lattice point can quickly access its neighbors.

Supernova Neutrino Boosted Dark Matter Calculations

Based on a paper from PRL that suggests it may be possible to search for dark matter boosted by neutrinos from past supernova explosions. I made some quick calculations regarding the potential observation of this signal in Super-Kamiokande.

Dipole Game running on an FPGA

A game in which the player is trying to avoid incoming objects by rotating two dots fixed on the opposite sides of the circle. The game is implemented on an FPGA by using Verilog Hardware Description Language, a demo video can be found in the link. FPGA interfaced with a screen via VGA, and with a speaker to provide visual display and sound. Everything is programmed from scratch; the mathematical functions like sine and cosine, every incoming shape pixel by pixel and their movement frame by frame, interface with the display, every note of the soundtrack and their precise timings.

Some Cool Engineering Projects

What I could salvage from 3 very fun engineering projects:

  1. ARMUT by DEBSA: A robot with a coilgun that can shoot other robots and (theoretically) avoid their projectiles. The coilgun is essentially an electromagnet that shoot a nail like ferromagnetic bullet at high speeds given enough power. Required a costum built voltage step up circuit (I even wound the inductancor myself) to store the required power in 3 large capacitors, and a relay based logic, since even power transistors (within our very limited project budget) cannot handle the instantenous current required by the electromagnet during shooting (they burn). It can detect the enemy robot and competition boundaries via ultrasound sensors, while also attempting to track enemy projectile via Doppler sensors.

  2. METUSAT (A Satellite From Middle East Technical University) participating in the 2015 International CANSAT (can satellite) competition organized by AAS (American Astronomical Society): A can satellite that can perform a controlled descent without propulsion, orient and balance itself with a reaction wheel, handle separation from its container, collect and send sensor telemetry to a ground station, protect an egg through the entire trip and record video of descent from 1 km altitude. METUSAT received 4th place prize in the competition, despite unluckily landing in a little pond and losing all video footage due to water damage (and many points). It excelled at every other task. The team had 10 members, and I was responsible for communications (telemetry and ground station) systems. Here is a news item about about our success.

  3. UniverseMaker: A game in projessing.js where the player tries to make the universe by controlling the fundamental forces after the Big Bang. Won the Most Educational Project Award in 2015 CERN Webfest! Only a few photos from different stages of the game survived the time…