Mahir Yavuz

Mahir Yavuz

Engineering and product leader. Teacher and advisor. Turning data into products since 1998.

Head of Engineering at AirOps. Before that, Mahir led engineering for Search, Recommendations and Ads at Etsy, co-founded Topos as its CTO, directed data science at R/GA and was a senior researcher at Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz. His teams have taken on data problems for companies including Nike, SAP, Siemens, PwC, Google and Microsoft, and his work at Etsy has been featured in a Google Cloud customer story and on the Stack Overflow podcast.

He has taught since 2003, at schools including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Pratt, the University of Art and Design Linz and Istanbul Bilgi University. At Columbia Engineering he lectures on Business Applications of LLMs and Product Management with AI. He has spoken at events such as TEDx Vienna, Microsoft Build, Google Cloud Next and the Fast Company Innovation Festival. More are listed under Talks and press.

He publishes a new data visualization every day at casualdata.com.

On view today

No. 013 · 13 Nov 2026 Turkish, suffix by suffix A Turkish word grows a suffix at each tap, from Çekoslovakya to 44 letters, while the English under it grows from one word into a sentence; four words to build, and a change of root changes the vowels of every suffix. Open the experiment →

Experiments

  1. No. 013Turkish, suffix by suffix
  2. No. 012Ebru, sheet by sheet
  3. No. 011A piano, tuned by ear
  4. No. 010The S&P 500, by weight
  5. No. 009The midterm tide
  6. No. 008Philosophy, mind to mind
  7. No. 007Iznik, plate by plate
  8. No. 006New York, interlocked
  9. No. 005The year in relief
  10. No. 004Istanbul, piece by piece
  11. No. 003Manhattan sundial
  12. No. 002Self-portrait in type
  13. No. 001Self-portrait in latent space