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Sahan Bulathwela (IN4MANIAC)

Lecturer/ AI Researcher

University College London

Biography

If you are interested in research internship (remote/onsite) / PhD opportunities on AI for Education, contact me with your CV and a prospective proposal!!

Sahan is a lecturer affiliated with the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence currently contributing to the X5GON project, AT2030 and HumaneAI project working with Emine Yilmaz, Catherine Holloway and John Shawe-Taylor. He is also part of the UNESCO Chair on AI team His research interests lie in the theme: “Improving AI-enabled systems for lifelong learning”. Before joining UCL, he worked in several research roles in the industry in cybersecurity and personalised advertising domains where he gained experience in user state modelling in a big data landscape.

Recent News

Interests

  • AI in Education
  • Recommendation Systems
  • Bayesian Statistics
  • Artificial Intelligence

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2022

    University College London, UK

  • MSc in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning, 2014

    University College London, UK

  • PGDip in Applied Statistics, 2012

    University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

  • BSc (Hons.) in Computing, 2010

    University of Portsmouth, UK

Skills

Artificial Intelligence

90%

Statistics

90%

Python

98%

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Board Trustee

Caribbean Hub AI Tech (CHAITECH)

Oct 2020 – Present London
Key Responsibilities: - Helping to identify and refine key objectives of the charity - Helping with curriculum design and planning the training experience of the CHAITECH Techprenour Programme - Identifying fundraising strategies and how to align them with causes - Leading the design process of training and mentoring activities related to Artificial Intelligence
 
 
 
 
 

Research Assistant

University College London (X5GON Project)

Apr 2018 – Present London

X5GON project (https://www.x5gon.org) envisions to leverage a Cross Modal, Cross Cultural, Cross Lingual, Cross Domain, and Cross Site Global Open Educational Resource Network for informal learners.

Main responsibilities include: - Conducting deep research and execute well designed experiments leading to inventing novel methods in improving informal learners’ learning trajectories. - Deriving automatic quality assessment models for educational resources - Deriving rich representations of knowledge and its learners - Deriving intelligent models for personalized recommendation of educational materials.

 
 
 
 
 

Principal Teaching Fellow

CambridgeSpark Ltd.

Sep 2016 – Present London/ Cambridge
Course development and review. Teaching and training professionals and university students in knowledge areas related to Machine Learning and Data Science. Courses created and taught: - Database Management Systems and Cloud Computing - Big Data and Distributed Computing - Exploratory Data Analysis and Machine Learning - Neural Networks Employers of past students: - JP Morgan Chase & Co - Morgan Stanley - Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance - Schlumberger Cambridge Research Centre and etc…
 
 
 
 
 

Data Science Engineer

Skimlinks

Sep 2015 – Mar 2018 London
Main responsibilities included: - Primary focus on New Product and Advanced Development with Research towards building innovative data products for Strategic growth - Mainly responsible for bridging the cutting edge data science and machine learning with HPC and distributed computing - Designing high performance data structures to enable teams to get the most out of TBs of data that pumps in to the systems on daily basis - Designing and Building massively parrallel, high performance data pipelines that utilise state of the art data structures, compression and machine learning algorithms

Accomplish­ments

API Winner : StoryTunes

Based on an article URL provided by the user we get the text, title, keywords and entities from the Alchemy API. We use the musiXmatch lyrics dataset of the million song dataset (http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/challenge) to generate a list of topic cluster of the available songs. Using the Alchemy information we then classify the article to one of this topics and retrieve the nearest songs. In addition we use the article entities to retrieve top songs directly from music APIs. Those combined results are then surfaced on the front end.

CIIP Research Fellowship

Cisco International Internship Programme (CIIP) is a programme for UCL students to conduct a one year research fellowship with a Research and Advanced Development team at Cisco Systems. One of the three students selected for the fellowship in 2013

UCL Advances Research Fellowship (Awarded Twice)

UCL Advances research fellowship is a scheme for UCL students to conduct bleeding edge research with Startup companies in London.

Recent Posts

Projects

HumaneAI Network

European Network of Human-centred Artificial Intelligence

X5GON

Cross Modal, Cross Cultural, Cross Lingual, Cross Domain, and Cross Site Global OER Network

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Recent Publications

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.

Semantic TrueLearn: Using Semantic Knowledge Graphs in Recommendation Systems

In informational recommenders, many challenges arise from the need to handle the semantic and hierarchical structure between knowledge …

Could AI Democratise Education? Socio-Technical Imaginaries of an EdTech Revolution

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education has been said to have the potential for building more personalised curricula, as well as …

Report on the WSDM 2020 Workshop on State-based User Modelling (SUM'20)

The SUM’20 workshop was held at the 13th ACM International WSDM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2020) in Houston, …

Contact

  • 90 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6LJ
  • Enter Building and take the lift to 1st Floor
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