Draft:Ayse Naz Erkan
Computer Scientist
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Ayse Naz Erkan is a Turkish-American Machine Learning and an AI Ethics engineer. Her most significant contribution came during her tenure as the principle engineer of Robinhood Markets Inc., where she helped the company to resolve the GameStop 2021 crisis..
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Submission declined on 29 April 2026 by SafariScribe (talk).
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- United States
- Turkey
- Machine Learning Engineer
- AI Ethics Engineer
Ayse Naz Erkan | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Istanbul, Turkey |
| Citizenship |
|
| Alma mater | New York University |
| Occupations |
|
| Employer(s) | Twitter Robinhood |
| Organization | Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics |
| Known for | Resolving the GameStop short squeeze crisis |
Early life and education
Erkan was raised in Istanbul. In 2004, she pursued PhD in Computer Science from Courant Institute of New York University(NYU) which she completed in 2009.[1] In 2021 after joining Robinhood Inc., she served in its engineering team until early 2022.[2]
Career
During her tenure at NYU, she had done research work in Yann LeCun's lab on deep learning applications for off-road autonomous robot navigation.[3] Following this she had studied semi-supervised learning at the Max Planck Institute For Biological Cybernetics.[4][5]
In January 2021, Robinhood Markets stopped selling GameStop shares because short squeeze of the shares caused huge losses to short sellers. This led to a great number of stockholders to raise tickets for their losses to Robinhood. For Erkan's efforts to clear the backlog of customer support tickets, Robinhood had praised her for taking the lead in helping with the issue.[2]
Published Works
Conferences
- Erkan A. N., Camps-Valls G., Altun Y. (2010) Semi-supervised remote sensing image classification via maximum entropy. 313 – 318[4]
- Erkan A. N., Kroemer O., Detry R., Altun Y., Piater J., Peters J. (2010) Learning probabilistic discriminative models of grasp affordances under limited supervision. 1856-1591[6]
- Erkan A. N., Karlen M., Weston J., Collobert R. (2008) Large scale manifold transduction. 448 – 455[7]
- Erkan A. N., Sermanet P., Hadsell R., Ben J., Flepp B., Muller U., LeCun. Y. (2007) Speed-range dilemmas for vision based navigation in unstructured terrain. 40(15). 300-305[8]
Controversy
In 16 February 2021, following a trip abroad to take care of her ailing mother in Turkey who suffered from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis(ALS) , she was fired from Robinhood on the same day when she arrived to work back in the US. Filing a FEHA lawsuit in San Francisco, she stated that the company had retaliated her for whistleblowing and gender discrimination because she questioned its unqualified hiring practices particularly for the role of Director of Engineering. Her new manager continued to put her in Performance Evaluation Plan (PEP) despite Robinhood recognizing her achievements for the company. Reporting to the HR led to her new manager calling her "immature" for which she said as plaintiff in the lawsuit,[2]
an insecure misogynistic male who Robinhood held to basement-level standards
The court tentatively ruled on that the case should move to private arbitration therefore siding with Robinhood's motion based on a clause in her employment contract. Erkan's lawyers, Michael Zarocostas and Omid Nosrati expressed their displeasure in the company treatment stating,[2]
Unfortunately, Ms. Erkan’s case is an example that no matter how accomplished you are, you can still face disparate treatment in your career
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