About the Instructor

Cengiz Günay is a postdoctoral fellow at the Emory Department of Biology. He works on computational neuroscience, which involves making computer models of neurons and neuronal networks and simulating them on massively parallel machines.

He often uses software engineering concepts in his work. He authored a Matlab toolbox to manage and analyze the massive data produced from his simulations, which he calls the Pandora Toolbox.

He got his Ph.D. in computer science in 2003 working on a less-biologically inspired neuronal network simulator, NeuroidNet. He also worked on metasearch engines and other neural network simulators during his graduate studies but his experience and interest in programming goes back much farther.

One of his noteworthy programming projects is a PC game called Legends of Istanbul, which was initially released on the Amiga platform. Cengiz and his development team (link in Turkish) ported this game to the PC platform with additional multimedia enhancements and it was released in Turkey around 1996. It contained roughly 10,000 lines of C code (including some assembly code) and was in general a big project because of the extent of custom low-level code (e.g., graphics, sound, timers) that needed to be written at the time. Although the game was not a commercial success for various reasons, it attained cult status after a while and still has fans in 2012. This is partly because they revived the game by releasing a free version of the game in 2006 that ran over a DOS emulator. Before this, the same team won a third place in a PC game competition in 1993 with a simple shopping game.