Emre Çalışır

AI Founder & Enterprise Solutions Architect | PhD (MIT / Polimi)

Agentic AI, LLMs & cloud agnostic enterprise infrastructures

Summary

PhD level AI researcher and enterprise grade Solutions Architect with over 12 years of experience bridging deep engineering with strategic business growth. As the founder of an advanced AI/NLP enterprise platform, I operate as a forward deployed technical authority, translating complex agentic architectures into reliable, secure, and compliant systems that global giants like Samsung and Vodafone trust with sensitive data. Driven by intellectual curiosity and a focus on responsible innovation, I excel as a player coach in high ambiguity environments. I own technical integrity from discovery to validated Proof of Concept, building cloud agnostic, auditable architectures that align CTOs with CFO metrics.

Experience

Mar 2020 to Present · Delaware, US & Kadir Has University Technopark, Istanbul

Pivony

Founder & Chief Solutions Architect

Company operates from Delaware (US) and Kadir Has University Technopark, Istanbul; engineering, delivery, and client programs run across both sites.
Primary strategic and technical authority for scalable, cloud agnostic AI and NLP platforms for Tier 1 clients including Samsung, Vodafone, Allianz, Akbank, and ETS Tur.
Scaled Pivony to more than $600K USD in cumulative revenue while serving Tier 1 enterprise clients.
Engineered production ready Agentic AI systems and LLM guardrails from discovery through validated PoC, extracting actionable intelligence from unstructured data.
Player coach for data science and engineering teams; secure global infrastructure (99.9% SLA) in regulated environments.
Technical pre sales and C suite discovery (CTO, CFO) with clear roadmaps and ROI justification.

Feb 2019 to Jun 2020, Boston, MA

MIT Media Lab

PhD Researcher (Progetto Rocca Fellow)

Progetto Rocca Fellowship at Laboratory for Social Machines (founded by Twitter).
Knowledge extraction from complex sources: semantic segmentation, topic discovery, attention based neural networks, sentiment analysis.
Publications at top tier international conferences.

Nov 2017 to Jun 2020, Milan, Italy

Politecnico di Milano

PhD Researcher

Conceptual framework for socio political phenomena from large scale data sources.
Peer reviewed papers at ACM, IC2S2, KDWEB and related venues.

Mar 2018 to Mar 2020, Yangon, Myanmar

Myanmar Digital Business Services

Chief Digital Officer

Regional business development and partnerships in AdTech.
Partnerships with Adform and Adnuntius for enterprise publisher services.

Experience (continued)

Apr 2013 to Oct 2017, Istanbul, Turkey

Vodafone

Data Science & Software Solutions Expert (Innovation Team)

GSMA awarded real time contextual recommendation engine; billions of transactions, millions in monthly revenue impact.
Big data pipelines and ML for churn prediction and communication modeling.
22 patent applications, 11 granted in telecom analytics.
Stack: Spark, Python, MongoDB, Cassandra, Storm, MapReduce, Java.

Jul 2008 to Sep 2010, Istanbul, Turkey

Accenture

Management Consulting Analyst / Intern

Process re engineering, sales growth, and strategy for Migros, Samsung, KordSA and other clients.

Sep 2007 to Sep 2008, Istanbul, Turkey

Microsoft

Student Partner & Club President

Campus representative and Computer Science Club President at Galatasaray University; nationwide web and innovation events.

Honors & IP

Patents
11 granted / 22 filed (telecom churn and subscriber behavior)

Awards
Philip Morris Futuremark startup competition winner; Teknofest winner; ITU Çekirdek Big Bang semi-finalist; raised funding from European VC Startup Wise Guys; nominated to 10+ local and international startup accelerators; Progetto Rocca (MIT); Vodafone Star 2015 & 2017

Publications
ICWSM, IC2S2, ACM SAC, IEEE/ACM ASONAM

References
Available upon request