2022-03-14: Yasasi Abeysinghe (Computer Science Phd Student)

My name is Yasasi Abeysinghe. I am an international student from Sri Lanka. I joined Old Dominion University as a Ph.D. student in Spring 2022 under the supervision of Dr. Sampath Jayarathna. My current research project involves evaluating human eye (oculomotor plant) features for an objective measure of working memory capacity. My research interests include machine learning, data science, human-computer interaction, and eye-tracking.

Ever since I stepped into the study of science in my early school days, I have been intrigued by the vastness of the field. My passion towards the field to explore and learn new things has carried me on a journey since then. In December 2018, I graduated with a B.Sc. Engineering (Hons) degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Moratuwa with first-class honors.

In the final year of my undergraduate degree program, I conducted my research on “Generation of Review Aspect Hierarchy using Word Embedding and Clustering”, under the supervision of Dr. Uthayasanker Thayasivam. In this research, an experimental study was conducted to find a novel algorithm for aspect representation and to find effective hierarchical clustering for aspect aggregation. In recognition of the above research, I got awarded with the CINTEC award, which is given to the student who has earned the highest marks for the Final Year Project, from the University of Moratuwa, Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

I started my professional career as an Engineering Intern at LSEG Technology | London Stock Exchange Group (June 2017 - Dec 2017). I worked in the Engineering Center of Excellence team, developing tools to measure the compliance of each project team to code review guidelines, building a central source to aggregate metrics from all code quality tools, and working on research and development tasks.

Upon the completion of my undergraduate degree program, I joined the industry as a Software Engineer at Sysco LABS, and in September 2020, got promoted as a Senior Software Engineer. Sysco LABS is the innovating arm of the Sysco Corporation which is the world’s largest foodservice company. At Sysco LABS, I worked for the Data-In-Motion platform team, building, deploying, monitoring, and supporting the multiple platform components such as Sysco’s API Platform and Event Platform, and underlying platform infrastructure for Sysco users. 

Moreover, I was the Vice President of Membership at Sysco LABS Toastmasters Club, Sri Lanka from July 2020 to July 2021. During this time, I was able to procure many awards by ensuring the club met the membership goals required at each phase of the Toastmasters journey. During the year July 2020 - July 2021, I have been the Vice President of Membership with the most number of new recruits in all Toastmasters clubs across Sri Lanka.

Prior to starting my Ph.D. career, I have gained an overall of 3.5+ years of industry experience working with state-of-art technologies on industry-applied projects. I am proficient in programming languages such as Python, Java, C, C++, NodeJS, HTML, CSS, and GO language and have experience in a cloud-based environment; Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, AWS Database Migration Services, etc.

At ODU, I am a part of the NIRDS Lab (Neuro-Information Retrieval and Data Science Lab) in WS-DL (Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group). I worked on a project towards applying machine learning models for preliminary eye movement data and cognitive load measures, under the guidance of Dr. Jayarathna. At present, I’m working to expand this work towards oculomotor plant features.

NirdsLab team at ODU (2022)

It is a privilege to study in a state-of-the-art research group like WS-DL under the guidance of its remarkable faculty. I am very excited about being a part of this research group and the journey ahead of me.

Thank you!

-- Yasasi Abeysinghe --