Biography

Dr. Cuneyt Akcora is an Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida with a joint appointment in Computer Science and the College of Business, where he is a faculty member of the FinTech Initiative and teaches and conducts research in financial AI. He is a member of the newly founded UCF AI Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Insubria, Italy, and his M.S. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Prior to joining UCF, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Texas at Dallas and served as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Manitoba, Canada.  He is a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship.

His research centers on data science and machine learning for complex networks, with a focus on temporal graph learning, blockchain systems, and financial networks. He is the author of the forthcoming course book Blockchain: Fundamentals, Data Structures and Algorithms for Data Science, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Akcora has led and co-led multiple externally funded research projects supported by NSF, Canadian NSERC, and industry partners, and actively collaborates across computer science, finance, and statistics. His work has appeared in leading AI and machine learning venues, including KDD, ICLR, NeurIPS, VLDB, ICDM, SDM, IJCAI, ICDE, and IEEE Transactions.

At UCF, he leads the Financial AI Lab, which provides applied research support through in-house graduate and undergraduate students who intern at and collaborate with industry partners such as Fairwinds Credit Union and the Equifax credit rating agency.