People

What we value the most about our research group is that we have a diverse range of expertise with individuals from different backgrounds; each of them is contributing with different perspectives to deliver something that is unique.

Meet our highly enthusiastic research group..!

Prof. Katrina Falkner (Pro Vice Chancellor – Learning & Teaching), Advisor

Dr Thushari Atapattu (Research Associate), Lead & founder

Dr Rebecca Vivian (Senior Research Fellow)

Dr Menasha Thilakaratne (Lecturer), Principal Researcher

Mr Thamindu Sasitha, Research Assistant

Past staff

Duc Nhan Do (Research Assistant) – Conversational agents to train mental health professionals and medical students (2023-2025)
Mahen Herath (Research Assistant) – multiple projects (2019 to 2025)
Dasun Athukorala (Research Assistant) – Detection of Cognitive Distortions (2023-2024)
Ankit Yadav (Student Research Assistant) – Joint modeling of emotion and mental illness (Feb 2022 – July 2024)
Dasuni Jayawickrama (Research Assistant) – Systematic literature review on emotion-cause extraction from unstructured text (Dec 2020 to Jan 2022)
Gathika Ratnayaka (Research Assistant) – Advancing the detection of cyberbullying through role modeling (Feb 2020 to Sep 2020)
Hamid Tarmazdi (Research Assistant) – Topic visualisation dashboard of MOOC discussions (2016)

Past students

Dr Abhilash Sridara (PhD) – Evaluation of essay type answers in MOOCs using NLP techniques (2020 – 2024)
Mostafa Mahdi (Masters in AI) – Advancing community directories: Leveraging LLMs for automated extraction in MARC standard venue availability notes (2024)
Dr Isuru Dharmadasa (PhD) – Extraction of cyberbullying triggers from social media text (2022 – 2025)
Dr Lavendini Sivaneasharajah – User roles in online learning context through linguistic expressions (2018-2023)
Dr Menasha Thilakaratne – Literature-based knowledge discovery using Natural Language Processing techniques (2017-2020)
Jacob Schwarz (Advanced Topics) – Early prediction of fake news using social media (Feb 2022 – July 2022)
Olivia Byrnes (Advanced Topics) – Toward personalised feedback by analysing argumentative structures in student writing (Feb 2022 – July 2022)
Sabby Saha (Masters of Data Science) – Multi-emotion modeling from Reddit data using NLP (2020-2021)
Georgia Zhang (Honours in Computer Science) – Emotion-cause modeling from Natural Language text (2021)
Dasuni Jayawickrama (Advanced Topics) – Emotion-trigger extraction from unstructured text (2021)
Georgia Zhang (Advanced Topics in Computer Science) – Automatic identification of roles associated with cyberbullying posts (2020)
Dung Anh Hoang (Summer Research student) – Advancing the detection of Cyberbullying in Social Media (2020)
Georgia Zhang (Topics in Computer Science), Detection of Cyberbullying aginst minorities (2019)
Dasuni Jayawickrama (Summer Research student), Discourse analysis of stack overflow threads (2020)
Dung Anh Hoang (Topics in Computer Science) – Automated identification of mental health issues in Social media (2019)
Alexa Ng (Topics in Computer Science), Impact of semantic relatedness of course content for video learning, 2018