{"id":102,"date":"2026-09-17T16:31:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.metu.edu.tr\/maerkan\/?page_id=102"},"modified":"2026-09-17T14:10:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:10:27","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blog.metu.edu.tr\/maerkan\/about\/","title":{"rendered":"About"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Mehmet Ali Erkan is a PhD researcher and Research and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Statistics at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, T\u00fcrkiye. His research combines statistical methodology with modern artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on statistically valid inference from large language models, uncertainty quantification, natural language processing, legal AI, information retrieval and the evaluation of efficient and reliable machine-learning systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">His work spans both methodological and applied research. Current areas include calibration and risk control for model-generated evidence, conformal and prediction-powered inference, Turkish and low-resource legal NLP, retrieval-augmented generation, benchmark construction, time-series methods and energy-aware evaluation of NLP systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Education<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">Ph.D. in Statistics<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Middle East Technical University<\/strong>, Ankara, T\u00fcrkiye<br>September 2025 \u2013 present<br>Advisor: Prof. Dr. Ceylan Yozgatl\u0131gil<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">M.Sc. in Statistics<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Middle East Technical University<\/strong>, Ankara, T\u00fcrkiye<br>September 2023 \u2013 August 2025<br>GPA: 3.86\/4.00<br>Thesis: <em>Turkish Legal NLP: A Comprehensive AI Framework for Legal Document Understanding, Summarization, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation<\/em><br>Advisor: Prof. Dr. Ceylan Yozgatl\u0131gil<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">B.Sc. in Statistics<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Middle East Technical University<\/strong>, Ankara, T\u00fcrkiye<br>September 2019 \u2013 July 2023<br>GPA: 3.45\/4.00<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Previous Experience<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li class=\"has-small-font-size\"><strong>Project Intern \u2014 Presidency of the Republic of T\u00fcrkiye, Ankara<\/strong> (May\u2013September 2023): model validation and development, applied machine learning, and interactive dashboards in R Shiny.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"has-small-font-size\"><strong>Data Science Intern \u2014 Yap\u0131 Kredi, Istanbul<\/strong> (May\u2013September 2022): PL\/SQL-based data analysis and marketing analytics projects.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mehmet Ali Erkan is a PhD researcher and Research and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Statistics at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, T\u00fcrkiye. His research combines statistical methodology with modern artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on statistically valid inference from large language models, uncertainty quantification, natural language processing, legal AI, information retrieval [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9623,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-102","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.metu.edu.tr\/maerkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.metu.edu.tr\/maerkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.metu.edu.tr\/maerkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.metu.edu.tr\/maerkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.metu.edu.tr\/maerkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.metu.edu.tr\/maerkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.metu.edu.tr\/maerkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}