Artificial intelligence · machine learning · quantitative finance
Gökhan Mergen
Twenty years turning statistical models into systems that run at scale — in search ads, on wearables, and in live markets.
Connecting abstract math with real world problems.
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About
Biography
This site brings together my biography, publications, quantitative finance notes, code, and photography.
I received my BS in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics (double major) from Middle East Technical University, and my MS and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2005, with a minor in applied mathematics. My doctoral work was on signal processing and communications theory for wireless networks.
I spent five years at Qualcomm developing signal processing algorithms for mobile internet—work that produced 12 US patents and shipped in the company's 3.5G chipsets. I then moved to quantitative finance, spending nearly six years at RGM Advisors as a researcher and later partner, responsible for the P&L of a portfolio trading low-to-mid single digit market share across world equity and futures markets, and building the ML models behind it. After a year at Apple building machine learning features for Apple Watch and a stint leading quants and engineers at a hedge fund startup, I joined Google in 2017, where I now lead teams working on AI-driven personalization and intent modeling in Search Ads.
I've served on the Electrical Engineering advisory committee at San José State University since 2019.