Home | Emre Sokullu

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My name is Emre (pronounced Am-Ray) and I'm the founder and CEO of Grou.ps which is one of the first, if not first, private social networking platforms. I've started it in late 2005. Today it's part of part of Grou.ps Inc, a social graph infrastructure company.

Prior to Grou.ps I worked at hakia, an AI startup (before it was this cool) which was my first step to a work visa in the US. hakia's semantic search technology was a predecessor to Google's -what we call today- Knowledge Graph. I joined hakia after a short internship stint at Princeton University Wordnet Project which was also my first time in the US.

During college (Bogazici University) from 2001 to 2005, I worked on several projects. Dilmaca, now open source, was a web-scale machine translation software that did a decent job for a mechanical approach. Although the challenges were of academic level. Having realized Dilmaca wouldn't monetize anytime soon, I quickly moved on to something else, Turkix, which paved the way to a small acquisition -- not a bad outcome for the age of 20!

Turkix was the first Linux distribution that supported all Turkic languages. Eventually Datron, then the leading laptop producer in Turkey, approached us to bundle it with their low-end models and replace Windows. As part of Turkix, I also led Apache Software Foundation's Turkey operations, built a community of volunteers and hatched the first version of Turkish httpd documentation. Last but not least, SimpleKDE, which was a desktop environment that came with Turkix gained so much traction that I got invitation from KDE headquarters to join their KDE Quality team; a proud moment for a 20-years-old kid.

You can find more about me in this biography compilation by Firat Demirel, Gelecegi Gorenler.

Patents (w/ pending and provisionals)

(*) Measuring health and fitness data using proximity sensors and mobile technologies(PCT/US2015/048437 )
(*) Using proximity sensors for receiving signals in a facility (PCT/US2015/053363)
(*) Method and System for Statistically Determining what Social Network Context to Share a Particular Content With (USPTO #14325714)
(*) ... and tens of more in the fields of social networking, semantic search, cyber security

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