Turkey's Elon Musk: 'Zülal Tannur!'

TULUHAN TEKELİOĞLU / 12punto.com.tr

They call her Turkey's Elon Musk! With the software she developed, she became a partner to the world giant Nvidia, whose star is shining bright with artificial intelligence. “She produces technologies not only for people who cannot see, but also for the devices that cannot see.” I met Zülal Tannur at the awards night of the Bursa Business Women and Managers Association. She told me that she was inspired by our documentary GÜÇ SENSİN (The Power is You), which tells the youth who have forgotten how to dream about the power of dreaming. It made me so happy... I wanted to introduce you to this young genius who will leave a mark on the future of the world. Zülal Tannur, who received the “Most Successful Young Entrepreneur of the Year” award from Buikad, is one of the rising stars of Silicon Valley…

 Zülal was born as a child with low vision. Her visual capacity was below 5 percent. She could not fully recognize people's faces, objects, or colors. When Zülal was 4 and a half years old, her parents developed a method. They took photos of the faces of all the individuals in the family and all the people at her school and transferred them to a computer. Zülal studied those faces repeatedly and learned who they were. Later, she learned to see objects that she might encounter in the world by using cards from memory games. In this way, her family managed to improve Zülal's visual skills until she was ten.

Zülal started using a computer before she even learned to read and write. Thanks to the plasticity of the brain, she was able to complete and recognize everything with her brain.

One day, when she was 10 years old, she suddenly lost her vision. She describes that day as follows;

“While I was celebrating my birthday the day before, I was unaware that the next day would be the first day of my new life. First, my object recognition ability was affected. Then, according to the laws of physics, colors decreased until only blue, known as the second highest energy color, remained, and then it completely went to zero! I cannot see at all right now. When I look back, I see that I am now teaching my technologies the ability to learn to see, which I learned over a ten-year period!”

Today, Zülal Tannur is working at Arizona State University to design artificial vision. She is on her way to becoming the world's first visually impaired neuroscientist. “My entire life has become the wavelengths that make me see the world,” she says.

Zülal has a tremendous success story.

She was accepted to the University of Arizona when she was 18. After losing her vision, she pursued technologies that would allow her to access information about the visual world through technology, by imitating the process of learning to see. She had the chance to take on responsibilities in the teams that first produced this technology. She became a user, developer, and leader of these technologies. She took on responsibilities as a volunteer in many technology initiatives and teams.

Zülal took on important responsibilities in the teams for the image processing technologies that Microsoft integrated into Turkey for the first time. She worked as a leader responsible for 59 countries at a Microsoft partner company. Thanks to her extraordinary leadership skills in the technology development process, she was deemed worthy of Microsoft's “Woman Leader Shaping Technology” award.

I was trained by Microsoft Turkey and Microsoft global as the world's first and only visually impaired technology ambassador. She received the Google Women TechMaker title, given by Google to powerful women developers in technology. Realizing that the technologies produced were quite far from biological vision, she decided to establish her own technology company by designing artificial vision systems to bridge the gap between biological vision and image processing technologies.

She founded her first company, FROM YOUR EYES, in Turkey in 2023, and NeuroVision AI Tech in America in 2024. The technologies she produced in 2024 were announced worldwide by Google's #weareplay campaign, which highlights the world's most successful technology developers. Zülal's life was published as a short documentary. The technologies she produced became world champions in the Microsoft Imagine Cup, which has been held by Microsoft for 22 years and where Turkey had not had a first-place finish until then.

Winning a 100 thousand dollar cash prize from Microsoft, she received mentorship from Microsoft's Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella.

With the support of Microsoft Global, NeuroVision AI Tech, the youngest company in Silicon Valley, gained great momentum. Zülal became the world champion in the individual achievement category at the TOYP Global awards, organized by JCI, where leaders like John F. Kennedy were awarded. She became a partner of Nvidia and Microsoft, the two most valuable companies in the world.

I asked Zülal;

-Who is your hero in life?

My first hero is my mother, my second hero is my father! Before I even used a computer, my mother would put tiny memory cards on a black cardboard so that I could see better. She would do face recognition exercises with me on the computer screen, just like she did in front of my first desktop computer. The person who held my hand and took me both to those memory cards and to the computer is my mother, my first hero!

Later, my father, who taught me how to rebuild things when I broke technological tools and introduced me to a magic tool like a screwdriver, is my second hero! Thanks to my father, I had the chance to see the inside of everything. Microsoft executive Satya Nadella is one of the very precious heroes for me. We compare our stories a lot with him because his daughter is around my age and has an orthopedic disability. Thanks to her, Satya learned how important inclusivity is and, in this way, changed the culture of a giant company like Microsoft to be accessible from day one. So, in a way, we can say, “The best healer is the wounded one.”

-You were inspired by our documentary GÜÇ SENSİN. This made me very happy. How did “GÜÇ SENSİN” affect you?

When I watched the “GÜÇ SENSİN” documentary, I had just started working on the project idea for FROM YOUR EYES. It was 2020. The pandemic had just started. It gave me tremendous excitement and inspiration. The people I met in the documentary then became my friends. The words I heard in the finale of the documentary still guide me today. I continue to make this sentence an inspiration for many people as well.

“The size of unopened wings is unknown.” This sentence has become a North Star that always guides me regarding the depth of my own potential. Now, I share this sentence with others who see me as a role model to make them believe in their own potential.

-What is your biggest dream today?

“My dream is to manipulate the sense of vision with the software we produce,” she said. We have come a long way in terms of software for this, and my dream is to realize this by combining it with neurotechnologies. I am working heart and soul for this. I will continue to work to design advanced artificial vision systems throughout my life. My concern is to make people and machines, that is, the world, see. Perhaps from a place they have never seen before.

-What kind of Turkey would you like to see?

In my heart, there is a country where young entrepreneurs like me dream courageously, are not afraid to invent, do not struggle to unleash their potential due to the disadvantages they have, and where a very wide audience can feel the passion for producing high technologies. I see this perseverance and determination in many technology teams around me. I am really, very hopeful about us, our vision, and the world firsts we will achieve.

-How should one read this century?

In my opinion, this century is a century where the biggest investment is “time.” There is no time to lose. Because the barriers to accessing information are gone. The new fuel for us is data! It is not enough to just possess that data; it needs to be used in the most effective way. I believe that neurotechnologies to be developed through human and artificial intelligence cooperation will be the greatest revolution. What I observe in Silicon Valley is that the technology world is currently developing itself in this direction. It is a period of detailed learning to develop the best technologies right now. So, it is an incubation period, in my opinion. These technologies will develop very rapidly. We must both develop ourselves in this field and develop the most beneficial technologies.