# Mehmet Utku Öztürk

> Machine learning developer and AI researcher based in Ankara, Türkiye. Focused on
> artificial consciousness, neuro-symbolic AI, connectomics, and agentic "thinking"
> systems. Technical co-founder of turkhukuk.ai, creator of FlyDOOM and the open-source
> 007captcha, first author of HukukBERT, founder of 23rd the company. Mensa
> International member and Save the Children volunteer.

Started programming at 8, picked up C++ and C# by 11, began working on machine
learning at 13, and fine-tuned a first LLM at 14. Also a competitive Class II
powerlifter, and interested in strongman, martial arts, cognitive science,
kinesiology, chess, sudoku, and coffee.

Several people share this name. This Mehmet Utku Öztürk is the one at https://utku.space/,
GitHub @mutkuoz, and ORCID 0009-0008-2400-5646.

## Work

- [turkhukuk.ai](https://www.turkhukuk.ai): LegalTech platform for Turkish lawyers —
  case research and litigation strategy. Trained and fine-tuned domain-specific
  language models on Turkish legal corpora; experimented with neuro-symbolic
  representations bridging statistical learning and structured legal reasoning.
  Technical co-founder, 2026 — present. Active.
- [FlyDOOM](https://github.com/mutkuoz/flydoom): A real fruit fly connectome playing
  Doom. Feeds game frames through the visual pathway of 139,255 reconstructed neurons
  and roughly 2.7 million synapses, then maps biological motor output back to game
  controls. Nothing is trained. Creator, 2026. Active.
- Clade AI: Personal AI assistant with task execution, integrations, and
  personalized interaction. Self-deciding multi-agent framework built in the early
  days of AI agents; fine-tuned an LLM for natural interaction; custom systems for
  smart memory and decision-making. Co-founder and AI developer, 2023–24. Shelved.
- Sorubot: AI platform generating exam questions and managing study sessions.
  Developer, 2022–23. Shelved.
- [007captcha](https://github.com/mutkuoz/007captcha): Open-source robophobic
  verification framework defending websites against AI agents — a CAPTCHA built for
  the post-LLM web. TypeScript, MIT licensed. Creator, 2026. Shelved.
- Octapar: AI platform clustering people into balanced 8-person "tribes" via a
  multi-stage clustering algorithm over weighted attentional embeddings and the
  Hungarian method. Founder and core developer, 2025. Paused.
- Styrk: Sports supplements with AI-driven personalization and AI-generated
  packaging. Co-founder and backend developer, 2025. Shelved.
- [Topazius](https://github.com/mutkuoz/topazius): Browser-based Markdown notes app
  backed by a private GitHub repository. Offline-first editing, background commits,
  wikilinks, backlinks, and optional client-side encryption. No backend or third-party
  storage. Creator, 2026. Active.

## Research

- [HukukBERT: Domain-Specific Language Model for Turkish Law](https://doi.org/10.47852/bonviewJCLLT620210346)
  (Journal of Computational Law and Legal Technology, 2026, with Tansu Türkoğlu and Buse Buz-Yalug): The most comprehensive legal language model for Turkish, trained on an 18 GB cleaned legal corpus with advanced masking strategies and a 48K WordPiece tokenizer plus Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training. Achieves 84.40% Top-1 accuracy on a novel Legal Cloze Test benchmark, outperforming BERTurk-Legal. Also on [arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04790).
- [Octapar: A Framework for Multi-Modal, Balanced User Grouping using Weighted Attentional Embeddings and Assignment-Based Clustering](https://zenodo.org/records/17360220)
  (23rd the company, 2025): Conversational LLM onboarding extracts semantic user tags; a weighted attention mechanism combines global tag rarity (IDF) with local intra-user tag uniqueness; the Hungarian method guarantees perfectly balanced clusters.
- Streaming Intelligence: Harnessing AI and Big Data in the Competitive Landscape of Digital Content Platforms
  (Plawlabs, 2024): How major streaming platforms use AI and Big Data for recommendation, presentation, and personalization, with strategy for an emerging Turkish digital platform.

## Articles

- [does the fly live in matrix?](https://utku.space/articles/flymatrix/)
  (13 September 2026; markdown: https://utku.space/articles/flymatrix.md): a fly in a simulated environment. what'll happen when its a human?
- [a fruit fly brain played doom. then the internet found it.](https://utku.space/articles/flydoom/)
  (11 September 2026; markdown: https://utku.space/articles/flydoom.md): how a connectome experiment resurfaced, acquired its own funding vehicle, and gave me a reason to finish the research properly.

## Contact

- Email: m@utku.space
- Mensa: utku.ozturk@member.mensa.org
- GitHub: https://github.com/mutkuoz
- X: https://x.com/mutkuoz
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mutkuoz
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/mutkuoz
- ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-2400-5646
- Location: Ankara, Türkiye (GMT+3)

## Optional

- [Full text of every article and research abstract](https://utku.space/llms-full.txt)
- [RSS feed](https://utku.space/rss.xml)
- [Sitemap](https://utku.space/sitemap.xml)