EnglishCentral Opens New R&D Center in METU Technopark

EnglishCentral Opens New R&D Center in METU Technopark

February 18, 2019 by englishcentraladmin Leave a Comment 

Ankara, Turkey – February 18, 2019, – EnglishCentral, the leading provider of online English conversation solutions, today announced the grand opening of an R&D center in Ankara, Turkey. EnglishCentral joined President Erdoğan of Turkey as part of the grand opening of the METU Technopark, IT & Innovation Center, a newly designated high-tech R&D Center in central Ankara.

At the heart of the Center is Middle East Technical University (METU), the leading technical university in Turkey. As President Erdoğan articulated at the grand opening, “the idea of the Center is to form a close collaboration between the university and industry, powered by the world’s leading technology companies that bring an innovative spirit to the technopark”.

EnglishCentral is proud to be one of the founding tenants in the new technopark, along with other technology leaders such as Samsung, Tüpraş, the largest energy company in Turkey, and Onedio, the premier social media site in Turkey.

The EnglishCentral team, located in the technopark, now consists of 30 members, and will serve as one of the key R&D centers for EnglishCentral globally, focusing on machine learning and speech recognition, the two technologies behind our proprietary speech assessment system called IntelliSpeech℠.

“We have been incredibly impressed by the level of talent we’ve been able to hire at our tech center in Turkey,” said Alan Schwartz, CEO of EnglishCentral, Inc. “We are hiring top talent out of METU, Bilkent and other universities, and the team there is now working on our most challenging projects to serve our customers in Turkey as well as globally in Japan and other countries.

“Our plan is to use Turkey as our base to expand to both toward Europe and towards the Middle East”, said Kağan Cihangiroğlu, EnglishCentral’s General Manager for Turkey & the Middle East. “In addition to technical talent, we have teamed with up with a number of the leading universities in Turkey to develop English language learning curriculum that leverages our strengths in Speaking Assessment, and Adaptive Learning.”