An article titled "Left-Tail Momentum: Underreaction to Bad News, Costly Arbitrage and Equity Returns" coauthored by Sabancı Üniversitesi School of Management Faculty Members Yiğit Atılgan, Özgür Demirtaş, A. Doruk Günaydın and Georgetown University – Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business Faculty Member Turan G. Bali has been accepted to Journal of Financial Economics Magazine and will be published soon.

This article documents a cross-sectional negative relation between downside risk metrics such as value-at-risk and future equity returns for stocks traded in the U.S. and other international markets. The study provides a behavioral explanation for this anomaly and shows that retail investors underestimate the persistence of downside risk and overprice securities that have experienced large recent losses. Thus, the prices of stocks that are located in the left-tail of the return distribution continue to fall in the future resulting in a phenomenon that we term as left-tail momentum.

Journal of Financial Economics Magazine

Journal of Financial Economics is an elite academic journal in the field of finance and economics. It is one of the 50 journals that are used to calculate Financial Times rankings in the field of management. Many Nobel Economics Prize winners have contributed and continue to contribute to the journal.

OpsGenie, a technology company co-founded by Sabancı University Computer Science and Engineering 2004 graduate Sezgin Küçükkaraaslan was acquired by the technology conglomerate Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM) for 295 million US dollars. OpsGenie became the first Turkish technology company to be sold at this scale.

Founded in Ankara in 2012, OpsGenie has nearly 4000 clients. OpsGenie sells a software that warns engineers against software and website interruptions, and notifies the right teams in case of an interruption to ensure a quick response time.

In case of an issue with a website or application, OpsGenie sends text messages or automated phone calls to designated personnel. If a recipient is unavailable, the notification is sent to alternates or the whole team. Meanwhile, OpsGenie also ensures the coordination of monitoring (NewRelic, Nagios etc), ticketing (Jira, Zendesk etc), and collaboration (Slack, HipChat etc.) tools involved in the process. When the issue is resolved, designated personnel are sent updates about the issue, and may receive reports regarding the timeline of problem resolution.

The OpsGenie alert system will work with Atlassian’s Statuspage, a downtime communication tool for employees and clients, as well as Jira Ops, an IT service management product that helps IT employees minimize downtime and service interruptions. Jira Ops will help IT employees monitor network interruptions, warn the right people to resolve the issue, and start a Slack chatroom to coordinate efforts.

The software developed by Atlassian for software engineers include Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket. Seeking to expand its IT market with products aimed at operations teams, the company acquired OpsGenie to grow its suite of products and benefit from OpsGenie's market knowhow.

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design Program faculty member Selçuk Artut opened his first solo exhibition, “Habituation” in Berlin.  The exhibition will be available for viewing between January 18 and April 12, 2019 at the Zilberman Gallery, Berlin. 

Selçuk Artut’s oeuvre deals with ontological questions through the use of sound art, interactive technologies and artifi cial intelligence. The artist’s interest lies in the minor differences that would claim changes, swells of time, in which Artut works with codes and computational algorithms. Artist’s sleek metal sheet sculptures hide a world with wires, which needs a quick glance to what is hidden, supporting his questions on perceptive reality. 

Inspired by Barry Truax’s book Acoustic Communication, the software installations and sculptures of the exhibition explore the notion of habituation—the ceasing response to a stimulus as a result of adaptations of brain to sound. In some pieces, Artut uses random algorithms to disturb a possible habituation. In Habituation of Dishabituation (2019) Artut deals with the fact that constant disruption of a certain sound or image (dehabituation) might also lead to habituation. Similarly, what is perceived as repetition that causes habituation in the fi rst glance, includes various shifts and differences. Playing with such ideas, the piece Isomorphism (2019), consisting of sound bars, brings us into a soundscape, a new layer of architecture in the belle-epoque space of the gallery.  

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an introduction by Lotte Laub, and essays by Selçuk Artut and Siegfried Zielinski.  

Times Higher Education (THE) revealed the 2019 Emerging Economies University Rankings. The ranking considered 442 universities in 43 countries determined by THE.

Sabancı University entered THE's Emerging Economies University Rankings in 20th place, becoming the best among the 23 Turkish universities on the list.

Similar to the World University Rankings, the THE Emerging Economies University Rankings list uses a methodology that covers Teaching, Research, Citations, International Outlook and Industry Income using 13 performance indicators. A key difference is that the "Industry Income" and "International Outlook" categories carry more weight compared to World University Rankings due to the rankings being specific to emerging economies.

Turkish universities on THE's Emerging Economies University Rankings 2019 were Sabancı (20th), Koç (26th), Bilkent and Boğaziçi (71st), ITU (74th), Hacettepe (99th), METU (114th), and Eskişehir Anadolu (172nd). Furthermore, the Akdeniz, Erciyes, Gebze Technical and Istanbul Universities were in the 201st to 250th range; Atılım, Bahçeşehir, Çukurova and İzmir High Technology Universities were in the 251st to 300th range; TOBB Economics and Technology University in the 301st to 350th range; and Ankara, Dokuz Eylül, Gazi, Marmara, Ondokuz Mayıs and Yeditepe Universities in the 351st and above.

Please click here for the complete THE Emerging Economies University Rankings.

January 15th ELAE result code explanations are as follows:

The new administrative period of our university has begun with the appointment of our President Prof. Dr. Yusuf Leblebici and his three new Vice Presidents. The Vice President in Charge of Education, Prof. Dr. Cem Güneri; the Vice President in Charge of Research, Prof. Dr. Mehmet Yıldız and the Vice President in Charge of Institutional Affairs and Social Impact, Prof. Dr. Fuat Keyman; along with our President, will direct and coordinate the university’s new ventures in the coming period.

The Vice President in Charge of Education, Prof. Dr. Cem Güneri will be responsible for:

• Determining the university’s policies and focus areas for education, and
• Collaborating with the university’s upper management for the distribution of resources,
• The coordination of education between the university’s faculties and institutes,
• The creation and perpetuation of graduate, post-graduate and continuing education programs,
• Managing student services and student relations,
• Providing good quality human resources necessary for achieving the university’s academic goals.

 The Vice President in Charge of Research, Prof. Dr. Mehmet Yıldız will be responsible for:

• Determining the university’s research policies and focus areas for research,
• Collaborating with the university’s upper management for the distribution of resources,
• The coordination of research goals within the faculties and centers,
• Working towards developing the amount and quality of the university’s research projects,
• Providing good quality human resources necessary for achieving the university’s research goals.

 The Vice President in Charge of Institutional Affairs and Social Impact, Prof. Dr. Fuat Keyman will be responsible for:

• The formation of the university’s units (faculties, centers) and processes in a harmonious and transparent manner, as well as for the creation of the institutional infrastructure needed to enable this,
• The united coordination of IPM, ERG, SU-GENDER centers, as well as the coordination between the research conducted in these centers with the graduate programs,
• The coordination between EDU + Professional Programs (within Sabancı University and new development),
• Contributing towards the university’s academic and administrative development in line with global standards and strategic goals, as well as the establishment of its policies,
• The contribution towards the national and international representation of the university, as well the coordination of the International Relations Office for the development of the university’s branding, recognizability and relations.

The short resumés of the Vice Presidents can be accessed here. We wish the whole management success in the new period!

Students who have Bachelor's, Master's or Doctorate diplomas or students enrolled at universities other than Sabancı University can apply to the courses offered by Sabancı University to participate as special students.

• To be registered as a student in a higher education institution to be able to take a course from undergraduate level,

• To be registered as a student in, or to be graduated from a higher education institution to be able to take a course from graduate level

The candidates apply for special student status should firstly meet the requirements determined by the relevant Faculty/Graduate School for the level of English.

Approval for special student application can not be considered as the approval of any diploma programs. Special students are not considered as Sabancı University student and can not benefit from the student rights.

 Transcript on which courses registered and course grades are printed can be given on demand to special students.

2018-2019 Academic Year Spring Term Special Student Application

Sabancı University Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Research and Application Center (SU-IMC) researcher Burcu Saner Okan was chosen to the technical committee of the Applied Vehicle Technology (AVT) Panel to be held in Trondheim, Norway on October 10 and 11, 2019. 

Burcu Saner Okan was appointed by the Undersecretariat of Defense Industry as a country representative to “AVT 304 - Graphene Technologies and Applications for Defense" sessions in the AVT Panel held by NATO since 2016 to determine the potential military uses of graphene, and build a roadmap regarding its contribution to existing and new defense applications. 

The co-chairs of the Specialists' Meeting that Saner Okan will take part in are representatives of the Swedish Defence Research Agency and Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. 

Please visit these links for more information and event program.

About Graphene

Graphene is a layer of carbon that is only one atom thick, and may be the most amazing and versatile material known to humankind. In addition to being the first two-dimensional atom crystal to be discovered, graphene is the thinnest and most resilient material that is light and flexible despite being even harder than diamond. Graphene's outstanding electronic, mechanical and thermal properties and high chemical stability allow it to be placed as an additive into structures. Graphene enables lighter and more reliable products that last longer.

The theme for the 2019 edition of the annual Sakıp Sabancı International Research Awards given by Sabancı University is “Future Of Multilateralism In Global Turmoil: Rethinking Security, Economy, Democracy” The deadline for submissions is January 29, 2019.

The Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award involves a Jury Prize that will be awarded to an individual who has made distinguished contributions on the above-mentioned theme.

In addition to the Jury Prize, Essay Awards will be given to three researchers under 45 years of age. An independent and international jury will select the Essay Award and Jury Prize awardees. 

Award Theme

In the introduction of his 1993 book titled Out of Control, Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century, Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to “discontinuity” as “the central reality of our contemporary history.” Rising authoritarianisms in today’s world cast a shadow over what was presumably learned from the atrocities committed by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Global governance through international organizations is shadowed by reliance on unfettered predominance of markets as well as many national obstacles jeopardizing social justice and prospects of peace. International organizations that were formed in the aftermath of the Second World War in order to prevent wars, defend human rights, democracy, and rule of law on an international scale seem to be declining in the course of the past decade. National referandums terminating the ratification of the Constitutional Treaty for Europe as well as Brexit raised questions about the stability and endurance of the European Union. Efforts of the United Nations General Secretariat to resolve conflicts such as the Cyprus issue did not deliver the intended results. Council of Europe’s guidance for democratization especially through the Venice Commission did not find a following among the leaders of its member countries. Leaders and analysts declared the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as obsolete and defunct. Are international organizations really in decline? Is there still room for multilateralism in international politics or is unilateralism becoming the only game in the world? Can international organizations still be engaged in facing global challenges to security, economy, and democracy? What are the new challenges that Turkey is facing in these times of discontinuity and global turmoil? Innovative, original essays on such and related questions are welcome.

About the Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award:

• All entries, which may be coauthored, must be new and original works, not published previously in any form.

• Essays must be of the format and size of a regular academic journal article (25 to 35 pages, in double-space format, including references).

• An abstract of 500 words embedded into the original essay and a short CV of the author(s) are required.

• Entries must be submitted in English, in the form of a Word document to the following address: award.sabanciuniv.edu 

• Essay Awards will be given to three researchers under 45 years of age. This category includes 10,000 USD for each of the three award-winning essays selected by an independent and international jury from among submitted essays.

• The Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award involves a Jury Prize of USD 25,000 that will be awarded to an individual who has made distinguished contributions on the above-mentioned theme. The same jury will select the Jury Prize awardee.

• More information: award.sabanciuniv.edu