Dr Berkan Sesen

Dr Berkan Sesen is an AI researcher and the co-founder of Recallify, where he leads the technology and the commercial side of the business. His career has been spent taking AI out of research and into production on real problems, first in medicine and then in finance, and he led the development of Recallify from its first version.

His DPhil at the University of Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar at New College, applied machine learning and semantic reasoning to the English Lung Cancer Database to predict patient outcomes and recommend treatments. The system he built, Lung Cancer Assistant, was piloted at three sites, and his paper on Bayesian networks for clinical decision support in lung cancer care has been cited more than 200 times. He was a visiting researcher at Stanford's Biomedical Informatics Research Centre in 2012, and won the Best Research Prize at the British Thoracic Oncology Group Conference in 2013.

He then spent a decade putting machine learning to work in finance. At Citigroup he co-led the global data analytics group in algorithmic trading. At J.P. Morgan Asset Management, as an executive director and senior quantitative portfolio manager, he launched and grew two machine-learning-driven thematic funds, JP Morgan Genetic Therapies and AU AM Future City, past $2 billion in assets, and is the first-named inventor on the patent application for the method behind them; the News Filter, an NLP system he co-invented there, won two industry awards in 2017. At UBS, as executive director and Head of Algorithmic Execution and AI, he set the AI strategy for the bank's multi-asset execution platform and built and led its team of quantitative researchers and developers.

Berkan co-founded Recallify with Dr Sarah Rudebeck in 2024, bringing the same mix of research, engineering and product and commercial leadership. Recallify is backed by Bethnal Green Ventures, its work is funded by grants from NIHR and Innovate UK, and it won the UKABIF Innovation Award in 2024. He has spoken at industry conferences on applied machine learning, including a keynote at The AI Summit in 2017.