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Curriculum Vitae

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Education

Postdoctoral Scholar in Artificial Intellegence, Apr. 2019 - Present

• University: Stanford University, USA
• Affiliations: Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL)
• Former affiliations: Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford Center for AI Safety, and SAIL-Toyota Center for Artificial Intelligence
• Advisor: Prof. Emily Fox, Prof. Carlos Guestrin, and Prof. Mykel Kochenderfer

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PhD in Computer Science, Mar. 2015 - Feb. 2019

• University: University of Sydney, Australia
• Affiliations: Australian Center for Field Robotics (ACFR) and Center for Translational Data Science (CTDS)
• Research topic: Probabilistic robot perception for uncertainty quantification in data‐scarce dynamic environments
• Advisor: Prof. Fabio Ramos, Robot Learning Lab

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MPhil in Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics, Aug. 2013

• University: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong
• Major Research Area: Human Factors in Human-Computer Interaction
• Research topic: Human Factors models to characterize open‐loop and visual‐feedback control in human‐computer interaction
• Advisor: Prof. Ravindra Goonetilleke, Human Performance Lab (HPL)

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BEng (Hons) in Electronic Engineering (First Class), Nov. 2011

• University: Sheffield Hallam University (SHU), Sheffield, UK
• Studied at: Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology, Sri Lanka
• Research topic: A markerless vision‐based hand gesture recognition system for smart homes
• Advisor: Prof. Sisil Kumarawadu
• Ranked number 1 out of 80 students throughout the program

Awards and Accomplishments

• Robotics: Science and Systems (R:SS) pioneers, 2018
• USydIS Scholarship, Uni. of Sydney, 2015-2018
• Data61/CSIRO (formerly NICTA) Enhancement Scholarship, NICTA, 2015-2018
• Postgraduate Studentship, HKUST, 2012-2013
• Teaching Assistant Award, HKUST, Spring 2013
      The second best departmental award for teaching based on student ratings.
• Teaching Assistant Performance Excellence Award, HKUST, Spring 2012
     The second best departmental award for teaching based on student ratings
• Zone 24x7 Excellence Award for Best Overall Performance BEng (Hons) in Electronic Engineering (Sheffield Hallam University - UK)
• Sheffield Hallam University's SLIIT Prize for Best Performance in the Final Year of BEng (Hons) Electronic Engineering during academic year 2011/2012
• Highest GPA in BEng Electronics Engineering (year 2), academic year 2010/2011
• Highest GPA in BEng Electronic Engineering (year 1), academic year 2009/2010

Professional Activities

• Recent Talks:
  - University of California, Irvine (UCI) AI/ML Seminar, virtual, Jan. 2022
  - University of Peradeniya Computer Engineering Seminar, virtual, Jan. 2022
  - ICAC AI in Practice workshop, virtual, Dec. 2021
  - AI Safety Workshop, Stanford, Sept. 2021
  - ICALP FUNCTION'21, virtual, Jul. 2021
  - Harvard University, MA, Jul. 2019
  - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (CSAIL robotics seminar), Jul. 2019
  - Toyota Research Institute, Los Altos, CA, Jul. 2019
  - Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic (CS seminar), Jun. 2019
  - Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, Jul. 2018
  - Uni. of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, Dec. 2017
  - iRobot, Pasadena, CA, Nov. 2017
  - Uni. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Urbana-Champaign, IL, Nov. 2017
  - Uni. of Washington (UW), Seattle, WA, Feb. 2017
• Organizing Workshops:
  - 2021 - Co-organized NeurIPS'21 4th Robot Learning Workshop: Self-Supervised and Lifelong Learning
      with Nathan Lambert (UC Berkley), Masha Itkina (Stanford), Alex Bewley (Google), Igor Gilitschenski (MIT), Markus Wulfmeier (DeepMind), Julien Perez (Naver), Roberto Calandra (FAIR), and Vincent Vanhoucke (Google Brain)
  - 2021 - Co-organized RSS'21 Robotics for People (R4P): Perspectives on Interaction, Learning and Safety Workshop
      with Matthew Gombolay (Gerogia Tech) Shreyas Koushik (Stanford) and others
  - 2020 - Co-organized NeurIPS'20 3rd Robot Learning Workshop:Grounding Machine Learning Development in the Real World
      with Masha Itkina (Stanford), Alex Bewley (Google), Igor Gilitschenski (MIT), Markus Wulfmeier (DeepMind), Julien Perez (Naver), Roberto Calandra (FAIR), and Vincent Vanhoucke (Google Brain)
  - 2020 - Co-organized R:SS'20 2nd Workshop on Robust Autonomy: Safe Robot Learning and Control in Uncertain Real-world Environments
      with Andrea Bajcsy (UC Berkeley), Jaime Fernández Fisac (Princeton), Sylvia Herbert (UCSD), Somil Bansal (USC), David Fridovich‐Keil (UT Austin), Mykel Kochenderfer (Stanford), and Claire Tomlin (UC Berkeley)
  - 2019 - Co-organized R:SS'19 Workshop on Robust Autonomy: Safe Robot Learning and Control in Uncertain Real-world Environments
      with Andrea Bajcsy (UC Berkeley), Jaime Fernández Fisac (UC Berkeley), Sylvia Herbert (UC Berkeley), Somil Bansal (UC Berkeley), David Fridovich‐Keil (UC Berkeley), Scott Niekum (UT Austin), Hadas Kress‐Gazit (Cornell), Fabio Ramos (Uni. Sydney), and Claire Tomlin (UC Berkeley)
  - 2019 - R:SS Pioneers Faculty Committee Chair
      with Tesca Fitzgerald (GeorgiaTech), Abhinav Valada (Uni. of Freiburg), and others
  - 2018 - Co-organized NIPS'18 Workshop on Modeling and Decision-Making in the Spatiotemporal Domain.
      with Neal Jean (Stanford), Fabio Ramos (Uni. Sydney), and Girish Chowdhary (UIUC)
• Program Committee/Paper Review Activity:
  - Guest Editor: Machine Learning journal, special issue on Robust Machine Learning
  - Associate Editor/Program Committee: IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) | Annual Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC)
  - Reviewer for Journals: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) | IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) | IEEE Transaction Image Processing(T-IP) | IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics (T‐IE) | AIAA ARC Journal of Aerospace Information Systems (AIAA) | Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (EAAI)
  - Reviewer for Conferences: Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) | International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) | International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) | International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) | International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) | AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) | Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) | Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) | Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) | IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) | IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) | International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR) | Australasian AI
• Membership:
  Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), IEEE Robotics & Automation Society and IEEE Computational Intelligence Society
• Founding Chair:
  IEEE Student Branch of SLIIT, 2011

Outreach Activities

• Research mentor for Stanford Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program, Jun. 2020 - Aug. 2020
      SURF is an eight‐week summer residential program designed to promote diversity (especially underrepresented minorities, women, first generation, and other identities) within the engineering and science student body in the USA.
• Volunteer thesis advisor for African Masters of Machine Intelligence program, Apr. 2020 - Nov. 2020
      AMMI is a Pan‐African Master’s degree program run by the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS). I remotely advised a student to complete a thesis on developing a low‐cost method for detecting Malaria.
• Career mentor for Inclusions@RSS, Apr. 2020 - Jun. 2018
      A mentoring program for groups traditionally underrepresented in robotics (including but not limited to: women, LGBTQ+, underrepresented minorities, and people with disabilities), especially students early in their studies and career.
• Career mentor for SL2College, Apr. 2017 - Jul. 2017
      A mentoring program to help Sri Lankan students with their higher education goals by providing information and guidance.

Teaching

• Guest Lectures, June 2020 and June 2021 Stanford University, USA
  
  Conducted two lectures on variational inference for state estimation - AA273 State Estimation and Filtering for Aerospace Systems [Lecture 1 Slides]
• Tutor (Teaching Assistant), August 2015 - July 2018 The University of Sydney, Australia
  Modules:
  - Sydney Business School
  1. QBUS6810 Statistical Learning and Data Mining
  2. QBUS3820 Machine Learning and Data Mining - data analysis, deep learning
  3. QBUS2310 Management Science - linear programming, inter programming, network optimization, quadratic programming
  4. BUSS1020 Quantitative Business Analysis - exploratory data analysis, hypothesis testing
  - School of Computer Science
  1. COMP5318 Machine Learning and Data Mining - prepared and conducted tutorials.
  2. INFO3406 Introduction to Data Analytics - prepared and conducted tutorials related to large-scale Machine Learning, Spark, etc.
  3. COMP5047 Pervasive Computing - Internet of Things
• Lecturer in Electrical & Computer Engineering, September 2013 - February 2015 Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology, Sri Lanka
  Modules:
  Prepared teaching materials and conducted lectures, tutorials and laboratory sessions (list of subjects). Working as the undergraduate second year course coordinator for Electronic Engineering programme of the Curtin University of Australia conducted in SLIIT, Sri Lanka.
• Graduate Teaching Assistant, February 2012 - August 2013 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
  Modules:
  Conducted laboratory sessions on solving optimization problems, developing ergonomically rich web interfaces, human reaction and movement analysis in performing computer-based tasks, human memory and learning, etc. (list of subjects)

Industrial Experience

• Associate Electronics Engineer (Intern), November 2011 - December 2011 Zone 24x7 (Pvt.) Ltd., Sri Lanka
  Developed a novel image compression algorithm for mixed signal processors as part of a product designed for Macy's, USA.
• Trainee in Communication, November 2010 - January 2011 Data and Access Network Operations, Sri Lanka Telecom PLC
  Gained experience on CISCO router configuration, network planning, Virtual Private Networks and ADSL.

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