Dr. Cuneyt Akcora is an Associate Professor at UCF with a joint appointment in the Department of Finance in the College of Business and the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. In Finance, he is a faculty member in the FinTech Initiative and he is a member of the newly founded UCF AI Institute.
He received his Ph.D. in CS from the University of Insubria, Italy. Prior to joining UCF, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He is a former Fulbright Scholarship recipient.
His research centers on data science and machine learning for complex networks, with a focus on temporal graph learning, blockchain systems, and financial networks. He is the author of the course book Blockchain: Fundamentals, Data Structures and Algorithms for Data Science, published by Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Akcora has led and co-led multiple externally funded research projects supported by Canadian NSERC, Research Manitoba, MITACS, and industry partners. His work has appeared in leading AI and machine learning venues, including KDD, ICLR, NeurIPS, VLDB, ICDM, ICML, SDM, IJCAI and ICDE. His Erdős number is 3 through the Turing Award winner Michael Stonebreaker of MIT.
I am not leaving a spiritual legacy of dogmas, unchangeable petrified directives. My spiritual legacy is science and reason. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, 1933.
PhD in Computer Science, 2014
Università degli studi dell'Insubria, Italy
M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering, 2010
State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, 2007
Karadeniz Technical University, Turkey
Ardahan Lisesi, Ardahan, Turkey
(July 2026) Our 'BO-Cloak' article will appear at ICML 2026.
(May 2026) Our papers 'TopoFormer' and 'ATEX-CF' appear at ICLR 2026.
(March 2026) Our survey 'Machine Learning for Blockchain Data Analysis: Progress and Opportunities' appeared in Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice.
(January 2026) Our paper 'A Unified Graph Neural Network-Based Approach for Few-Shot Learning with Task Nodes and DiffPool Abstraction' appeared in Neurocomputing.
(December 2025) Our papers 'TopER' and 'MiNT' appeared at NeurIPS 2025.
(August 2025) Our paper 'Chainlet Orbits: Topological Address Embedding for Blockchain' appeared at KDD 2025.
(January 2025) Our paper 'GOttack: Universal Adversarial Attacks on Graph Neural Networks via Graph Orbits Learning' was accepted at ICLR 2025.
(January 2024) Our paper 'GraphPulse: Topological Representations for Temporal Graph Property Prediction' was accepted at ICLR 2024.
(January 2024) Our paper 'Data Depth and Core-based Trend Detection on Blockchain Transaction Networks' appeared in Frontiers in Blockchain.
University of Central Florida
University of Manitoba
University of Texas at Dallas
Università degli Studi dell’Insubria
Invited and Online Courses