Ayse Basar Bener, B.S. (Business Administration, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey), M.A.S. (Management Information Systems, University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA), Ph.D. (Information Systems, London School of Economics, UK) is a full professor in the department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Ryerson University, the founding director of Data Science Laboratory, and the Director of Big Data in Office of the Provost and Vice President Academic in Ryerson University. She joined Ryerson University in July 2010 as the director of the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management, a position she held till October 2012. Prior to joining Ryerson, Dr. Bener was a faculty member and Vice Chair in the Department of Computer Engineering at Bogazici University.
Dr. Bener's main research area is big data applications in software analytics: software measurement, software economics, and software quality; in health sciences: personalized diagnosis, and medical analytics; and in green analytics: policy making strategies and trade-off models. She mainly tackles the problem of decision making under uncertainty by using machine learning methods and graph theory to analyze complex structures in big data to build recommender systems and predictive models, cognitive science (mainly cognitive biases) to model human behaviour and game theoretic models to determine strategies. In the past 14 years she held various senior administrative positions at Bogazici University. She founded and directed Software Research Lab (Softlab) where many industry funded research projects were undertaken locally and globally. She supervised over 40 MS and PhD students, and authored and co-authored more than 130 publications.
Dr. Bener is a IBM Canada Software Laboratory, CAS Research Faculty Fellow, and a member of International Software Engineering Research Network (ISERN). She worked as a TPC member, workshop chair in various IEEE conferences, steering committee member of Promise 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 (International Conference on Predictive Models), and chair of steering committee of Promise 2015, PC member of ESEM 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, co-hair of ESEM Short Papers 2014, co-chair of Big Data Eduaction Conference 2014, PC member of industry track in ICSE 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, PC member of student papers in ICSE 2010, PROFES 2012, 2013. She is an Advisory Board Member of IEEE Software Magazine. She regularly reviews papers for IEEE Transactions of Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, EMSE and Data and Knowledge Engineering journals.
Prior to joining academia, Dr. Bener held various senior executive positions in banking industry for more than 15 years in Turkey and in the UK. She was the deputy CEO of Citibank in Turkey, COO, CIO and Financial Controller of JP Morgan in Turkey, and the Regional Director of Advanced Technologies in Citibank UK for Europe, Asia, and Africa regions. She is a member of IEEE (senior member), IEEE Computer Society, ACM, AIS, IEEE EMBS, INFORMS, and AAAI.