Ece Kamar

CTO at Turing

Greater Seattle Area, United States

About Ece Kamar

Ece Kamar is CTO at Turing. Location: Greater Seattle Area, United States.

Ece Kamar is the CTO of Turing, leading the development of AI technologies for pushing frontier AI capabilities and their deployment to enterprises. Previously, Ece spent 16 years at Microsoft, most recently as Corporate Vice President leading the AI Frontiers Lab — a non-geographical, mission-focused lab inside Microsoft Research dedicated to pushing the frontier of AI capabilities, efficiency, and control. There, she spearheaded research on Microsoft's Phi series of small language models and agentic AI, and led the development of tools, benchmarks, and open-source projects including AutoGen and the Fara agentic models. She also contributed to the influential "Sparks of AGI" research paper. Earlier at Microsoft, she served as Deputy Director of Microsoft Research Redmond. Ece's research focuses on developing AI systems that can function reliably in the open world in collaboration with people. She has spent years studying the impact of AI on society and building AI systems that are reliable, unbiased, and trustworthy, integrating techniques from artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, responsible AI, and AI safety. She was instrumental in building Microsoft's Responsible AI efforts and served as Technical Advisor for Microsoft's Internal Committee on AI, Engineering, and Ethics. Her work shipped across Microsoft products — from Experiences + Devices to Azure Machine Learning and Cognitive Services — and she helped deliver the latest AI models, including GPT-4, within Microsoft products in a reliable and controllable way. Ece is an Affiliate Faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and Adjunct Faculty at Sabanci University in Turkey. She was a member of the first study panel of Stanford's AI100 and currently serves on the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB). She has served on the organizing committees of top AI and HCI conferences and received multiple best paper awards for her work. Ece received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul and completed her PhD at Harvard University, where she worked with Prof. Barbara Grosz on human-AI collaboration. Specialties: artificial intelligence, machine learning, human-AI teamwork, agentic AI, AI and society, bias, reliability, safety.

Skills

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Java

Additional experience

  • Corporate Vice President

    Microsoft Research

    Started September 2025

Education

  • Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Harvard University
  • BS, Sabanci University