About Burc Gokden
AI Researcher, Engineer & Inventor
Dr. Burc Gokden is a research scientist and engineering professional with over two decades of experience spanning artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductor manufacturing, and solid-state photonics. He is the founder of Fromthesky Research Labs LLC, where he leads fundamental AI research and develops practical, end-to-end solutions for industry — with a primary focus on large language models and natural language processing.
He is the inventor of PLDR-LLM (Large Language Model from Power Law Decoder Representations) and the Power Law Graph Transformer — novel architectures that generalize beyond standard scaled dot-product attention. His research demonstrates that non-linear attention with learnable power law coefficients can match and extend industry-standard LLM designs, opening new avenues for interpretability and efficiency. His scholarly work has been cited over 1,035 times with an h-index of 14.
Founder · Fromthesky Research Labs LLC · Ph.D. Northwestern University · Postdoc Harvard University
Career Highlights
AI/ML Researcher & Founder — Fromthesky Research Labs LLC (2019–Present)
Invented PLDR-LLM and Power Law Graph Transformer; developed open-source models on HuggingFace. Four published AI research papers on arXiv.
Senior ML Engineer — Siemens Digital Industries (2021–2025)
Pathfinding ML for semiconductor defect analysis and interpretable models using Shapley values and decision trees within the Calibre group.
Process & EDA Engineer — Intel Corp (2012–2021)
Led 10 nm process integration (Cannonlake/Icelake/Tigerlake/Alderlake) and developed EDA software for physical verification at 7 nm and 10 nm nodes.
Postdoctoral Fellow — Harvard University (2011–2012)
High-brightness Quantum Cascade Tapered Laser development in the Capasso Group.
Research Assistant — Center for Quantum Devices, Northwestern University (2004–2011)
Demonstrated record-setting broad-area Photonic Crystal QCL architecture with high power, high beam quality, and single-mode operation at room temperature.
Education
Ph.D. Electrical Engineering & Computer Science — Northwestern University (2011)
B.Sc. Electrical & Electronics Engineering — METU, Ankara (2003)
B.Sc. Computer Engineering (Double Major) — METU, Ankara (2004)