Dr. Riza C. Berkan, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Hakia

Dr. Berkan is a nuclear scientist by training with a specialization in artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. He is the author of several articles, including the book Fuzzy Systems Design Principles published by IEEE in 1997. After a decade long career in the nuclear field working on projects ranging from nuclear safety to control & diagnostics, Dr. Berkan founded hakia.com, a first-of-its-kind semantic search engine.

ASE: Describe Hakia’s special niche.

Dr. Berkan: hakia’s goal is to offer the shortest time to reach quality information, i.e. relevant, credible, and fresh content.

ASE: What is semantic search and how does it compare to the searches we’re used to?

Dr. Berkan: The underlying principles of the current search engines do not include “understanding”, but instead they rely on keyword retrieval by “approximation” i.e. popularity driven statistics. Hence, when referral statistics is not available, they fail. This happens when (1) the query is a long-tail query, and (2) the pages are dynamic so that there is no time to collect statistics. What does all this mean for the user? On average it takes 11 minutes for a searcher to get to information and half of the searches are abandoned. There is search fatigue.

Semantic search introduces “understanding” where the algorithm analyzes both the Web page and the query to match and rank meaning. To give an example, if you are looking to find out the answer to the question, “What drug treats headache?,” you have to enter various combinations of these words to be able to search all relevant text, such as “drug, treat, headache” ; “drug treat migraine”; “drug help headache”; “Tylenol treat headache”: etc. You get the drift. When responding to the same question, semantic search can deliver a search result that states “aspirin helps migraine” where no words match but the concepts do.

ASE: Please give us some cool sample searches.

Dr. Berkan: hakia Galleries Let you Do 10 searches at Once.
For short, discovery type queries, hakia brings categorized results (galleries) to offer a wide range of aspects of the search term.
Jaguar
Madonna
Breast Cancer
Piano
Cats
hakia offers deep search in verticals.
Try the query, “what causes dizziness,” and you will see that we bring results from selected databases including Wikipedia. When you click on “more+” you can take this query and search within Wikipedia.
We are adding more databases as we speak.
Try your long tail searches and compare us to your favorite search engine. You can do such comparison at the hakia Club.

ASE: What does hakia mean?

Dr. Berkan: The word hakia does not literally mean anything. However, as an international company, we wanted to create a name that works worldwide, is simple to pronounce and does not have any negative connotations.

ASE: Where were you born?

Dr. Berkan: Istanbul, Turkey.

ASE: What did you study in college?

Dr. Berkan: Physics. Once your undergraduate degree is in physics, you are a physicist for life, no matter what else you pretend to be.

ASE: What drew you to search engines specifically?

Dr. Berkan: Information technologies have been my interest area for more than two decades now. Especially fuzzy logic where we design algorithms that can operate in gray-shaded areas like the human brain. For example, if the weather is “bad” I will wear “thick” clothes.. This decision comes from processing “bad” and “thick” in our brains which is quite opposite to how traditional computers operate (either zero or one). If your specialty is fuzzy logic like me, you will be attracted to different forms of “computing with words”. A semantic search engine is just that. So, it was a natural evolutionary-path.

ASE: Who inspires you?

Dr. Berkan: Winston Churchill. I am not sure why, but perhaps he won the second world war just by using words. Language is powerful, and his mastery of it impresses me. His life style also rings a bell (except the whiskey)

ASE: Which languages do you speak?

Dr. Berkan: Two. Turkish version of English, and English version of Turkish. Or I can say zero because none of these languages I speak are the real thing. This is the unavoidable outcome of living half of your life in another culture. I sometimes wonder in which language I dream.

ASE: What are your hobbies?

Dr. Berkan: Genetics research. Sounds strange but true. It is like the life’s longest crossword puzzle.

ASE: Do you like to travel? Where?

Dr. Berkan: I have been in (probably) 46 states and a dozen of countries. I like to go historical places and archeological sites and to imagine the past. That’s if I find time.

ASE: Anything else you’d like to share?

Dr. Berkan: Semantic technologies will change the way we interact with computers. This is an undisputed reality of the future. I would ask people to give a try to hakia, if not for solving their tough search problems, then perhaps just to be part of something new and to be able to say one day “I was one of the first users, I was there when it happened.”

ASE: Thanks for joining us, Dr. Berkan. Best of luck with hakia!

Natalya Murakhver is a freelance writer/PR consultant based in New York City.

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