Tolga Soyata

Biography

I received my B.S. degree from Istanbul Technical University in Electrical and Communications Engineering in 1988, M.S. degree from Johns Hopkins University Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in 1992, and Ph.D. Degree from University of Rochester (UR) ECE in 2000. I owned and operated my own IT outsourcing business for 10+ years. While still operating my business, I joined UR ECE in 2008 as a Visiting Assistant professor. Later, I became a Research Scientist in 2011 and Assistant Professor - Research in 2012. In March 2015, I sold my business to focus entirely on academia. In May 2016, I have accepted an Associate Professor position at SUNY Albany ECE and have been a faculty member there since then.

My true passion is "parallel computation." I have been teaching courses related to that since my UR ECE days in 2008. These courses are: Advanced CMOS VLSI Design, GPU Architecture and Programming, and FPGA-based parallel processing systems. I have been the PI for the Nvidia GPU Teaching and Research programs for 5-6 years, while Nvidia had these programs.

The book I published in February 2018 (GPU Parallel Program Development Using CUDA) is a product of the experiences I gained from teaching GPU courses at UR and SUNY, feedback from students, and understanding ways to teach sophisticated parallel programming concepts in simple and intuitive ways since 2009. I had a lot of fun writing it; readers should have a lot of fun reading it and learning from it.

Education

B.S. Istanbul Techinical University, Elec. Comm. Eng
M.S., Johns Hopkins University, ECE
Ph.D. University of Rochester, ECE

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Teaching: VLSI, GPU, Parallel Programming, FPGA.
Research: Cyber Physical Systems, Autonomous Systems, Digital Health.

Personal Interests

Playing the piano.

Books