Resume
Dr. Ozgur Ural
Dr. Ozgur Ural

ML research scientist & senior software engineer | Trustworthy AI for mission-critical systems | U.S. Ph.D. (Embry-Riddle)

Trustworthy AI · Real-time & safety-critical systems · Applied ML research

Trustworthy AI
for mission-critical systems.

I'm Dr. Ozgur Ural, a machine learning research scientist and senior software engineer at Avion, where I build real-time software for Level D flight simulators and lead the company's AI strategy. My research asks what it takes to trust a model: evidence of how it was trained and who owns it, robustness against attackers, and predictable timing when it runs inside a real-time loop.

Leiden, Netherlands. Interested in research scientist roles in ML and AI, and open to research collaboration, advisory and speaking.

Research agenda Resume Get in touch
  • 12+Years shipping mission-critical software
  • Level DFlight simulators, the highest certification grade
  • ~50 GB/sSimulator telemetry pipeline, sustained
  • Ph.D.U.S. doctorate · 3 IEEE Access papers

Research agenda

Three questions, each from a system that has to work the first time. For each: the problem, what I have built or shown, and where it stands.

  1. Published · IEEE Access 2023–2025 · Ph.D. 2025

    Proving how a model was trained, and who owns it

    Models are bought, fine-tuned and shipped by people who did not train them. Proof-of-learning lets a trainer show the training was really done; a watermark lets an owner show a model is theirs. Each can be forged on its own.

    My Ph.D. and three first-author IEEE Access papers combine the two, so verification succeeds only when the training record and the watermark agree, and test the result against spoofing and adversarial attacks. Publications

  2. Open research direction, not yet published

    AI inside real-time, safety-critical loops

    A flight simulator answers the pilot within 150 milliseconds, sixty times a second, for hours, and is certified on it. Learned models can make it more realistic, but their timing depends on the input and on whatever shares the processor.

    I bring twelve years of hard-real-time and simulator software, from UAV mission control at STM to Level D simulators at Avion, and argue that a model earns a place in the loop only if every frame stays on time. The argument, as a film

  3. In industry · Avion, 2026

    Generative AI an engineering company can govern

    In an engineering company the useful knowledge sits in its own documents and processes, and an AI system has to respect where that data is allowed to go.

    I wrote Avion's AI adoption roadmap and a reference architecture spanning on-premises inference, governed cloud APIs and edge workloads, and built engineering-knowledge retrieval prototypes. Projects separates what is built from what is proposed.

What I bring to an industry team

  • Engineering Leadership

    Direction, standards, teams

    I lead Avion's enterprise AI strategy: the adoption roadmap and the reference architecture behind it. Before that I built mission-critical UAV software at STM and led the engineering team that shipped Havelsan's data-leakage-prevention product.

  • Real-time & Fault-Tolerant Systems

    Correct on time, and when parts fail

    Real-time simulator software and the services around it (C, C++, Scala, TypeScript, gRPC), including a telemetry pipeline that sustains about 50 GB/s through batching and bounded-queue backpressure.

  • Security, then ML Security

    Thinking like the attacker

    Seven years building security products (Comodo's secure web gateway and patch manager, Havelsan's DLP) before turning to ML security. A model earns trust by surviving contact with an adversary, not by scoring well on a clean test set.

  • Research into Practice

    Evidence a product team can use

    I turn a research question into something a team can judge: reproducible experiments, working prototypes, and explainers for non-specialists, like the films in the Research Lab.

Selected Work

Experience

  1. 2023–now Senior Software Engineer, Avion Full Flight Simulators. Real-time simulation platforms and cloud-native infrastructure for Level D flight simulators. Since 2026 also the company's AI adoption roadmap and enterprise reference architecture, the platform presenting it, and engineering-knowledge retrieval prototypes.
  2. 2021–2025 Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (Graduate Research Assistant). Dissertation: Enhancing Proof-of-Learning Security Against Spoofing Attacks Using Model Watermarking, guided by Dr. Kenji Yoshigoe (Committee Chair) and IEEE Fellow Dr. Houbing Song. Three IEEE Access papers, and SecurePoL (December 2025) with Dr. Yoshigoe after graduation. Dissertation · Verify diploma.
  3. 2020–2021 Software Team Lead, Havelsan. Led a 14-engineer team delivering the Havelsan DLP data leakage prevention product for defence and government clients.
  4. 2019–2020 Expert Software Engineer, STM Defence Technologies. Mission-control and ground-control systems for Kargu, STM's rotary-wing loitering munition in service with the Turkish Armed Forces, and the Togan reconnaissance UAV. Hard-real-time and safety-critical, where a missed deadline is a mission failure.
  5. 2014–2019 Expert Software Engineer, Comodo Cybersecurity. The Comodo Dome Secure Web Gateway, the enterprise Patch Manager and the Chromium-based Dragon browser, leading the design and development of Windows services and applications in C++.
  6. 2010–2014 B.Sc. in Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University (METU). Turkey's most selective computer engineering program (English-medium), entered among roughly the top 1,000 of more than 2 million national candidates. Graduated with 1st prize at TÜBİTAK's national project competition and 2nd prize at the METU CENG graduation Demo Day.

Peer Review & Service

  • Program Committee Member, 2nd Workshop on NLP Applied to Information and Cyber Security (NLPAICS 2026), University of Alicante. Conference
  • Journal Referee, IEEE Access, and other peer-reviewed journals in ML security, privacy and distributed systems
  • Reviewer, IEEE and ACM conferences in security, machine learning and distributed systems

Get in touch

For research scientist roles in ML and AI, research collaboration, technical advisory or speaking, write to me by email, or browse the publications, projects, field notes and essays.