Menasha Thilakaratne

Dr Menasha Thilakaratne

Lecturer

School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences

Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Technology

Eligible to supervise Masters and PhD (as Co-Supervisor) - email supervisor to discuss availability.

I am a co-founding member of the Language Technology for Social Good (LT4SG) group and a member of the Computer Science Education Research (CSER) group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide. 

My main research expertise is in the areas of data mining, knowledge discovery, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, and semantic web. So far, I have applied my knowledge in these research areas into diverse problem domains, including scientific literature mining, medicine, social sciences, education and psychology.

Winnovation Awards 2021

 

  • Appointments
    Date Position Institution name
    2021 - ongoing Researcher & Lecturer University of Adelaide
    2017 - 2020 PhD student University of Adelaide, Adelaide

  • Awards and Achievements
    Date Type Title Institution Name Country Amount
    2021 Award Dean's Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence The University of Adelaide Australia -
    2021 Award Winner of Winnovation Awards in the Maths & Data category Women in Innovation (Sponsored by FIXE - Future Industries eXchange for Entrepreneurship) Australia -
    2021 Recognition Finalist of Winnovation Awards in the Emerging Innovator category Women in Innovation (sponsored by Stone & Chalk) Australia -
    2020 Scholarship Faculty of Engineering, Computer & Mathematical Sciences Travel Scholarship The University of Adelaide Australia -
    2018 Scholarship SRW ACL2018 Travel Grant Roam Analytics Australia -
    2018 Achievement Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Engineering, Computer & Mathematical Sciences Faculty Finalist The University of Adelaide Australia -
    2017 Scholarship Faculty of Engineering, Computer & Mathematical Sciences Divisional Scholarship and Full Fee Scholarship The University of Adelaide Australia -
    2015 Award Professor Mohan Munasinghe Award for Computer Science University of Colombo School of Computing Sri Lanka -
    2014 Award David Pieris Group Gold Medal for the Best Performance in Industrial Placement University of Colombo School of Computing Sri Lanka -

  • Language Competencies
    Language Competency
    English -
    Sinhala; Sinhalese -

  • Education
    Date Institution name Country Title
    2017 - 2020 University of Adelaide Australia Doctor of Philosophy
    2011 - 2016 University of Colombo, Colombo Sri Lanka Bachelor in Computer Science

  • Certifications
    Date Title Institution name Country
    — Machine Learning Professional Certificate IBM -
    — Applied Data Science with Python Specialisation University of Michigan -
    — Natural Language Processing Specialisation DeepLearning.AI -
    — Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) Specialisation DeepLearning.AI -
    — Learning to Teach Online The University of New South Wales -
    — University Teaching The University of Hong Kong -
    — Blended Language Learning: Design and Practice for Teachers University of Colorado Boulder -
    — Inclusive Online Teaching Teach-Out Johns Hopkins University -
    — Resilient Teaching Through Times of Crisis and Change University of Michigan -
    — Online education: The foundations of online teaching Macquarie University -
    — Certification in Chartered Institute of Management Accountants Foundation Level CIMA -

  • Research Interests
    Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning Natural Language Processing Pattern Recognition and Data Mining

  • Journals
    Year Citation
    2020 Atapattu, T., Falkner, K., Thilakaratne, M., Sivaneasharajah, L., & Jayashanka, R. (2020). What Do Linguistic Expressions Tell Us about Learners' Confusion? A Domain-independent Analysis in MOOCs. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 13(4), 878-888.
    DOI Scopus5 WoS4
    2019 Atapattu, T., Falkner, K., Thilakaratne, M., Sivaneasharajah, L., & Jayashanka, R. (2019). An Identification of Learners' Confusion through Language and Discourse Analysis.. CoRR, abs/1903.03286.
    2019 Atapattu, T., Thilakaratne, M., Vivian, R., & Falkner, K. (2019). Detecting cognitive engagement using word embeddings within an online teacher professional development community. Computers and Education, 140, 14 pages.
    DOI Scopus26 WoS18
    2019 Thilakaratne, M., Falkner, K., & Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T. (2019). A systematic review on literature-based discovery workflow. PEERJ COMPUTER SCIENCE, 5, 40 pages.
    DOI Scopus22 WoS17 Europe PMC7
    2019 Thilakaratne, M., Falkner, K., & Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T. (2019). A systematic review on literature-based discovery: General overview, methodology, & statistical analysis. ACM Computing Surveys, 52(6), 34 pages.
    DOI Scopus24 WoS15

  • Conference Papers
    Year Citation
    2020 Thilakaratne, M., Falkner, K., & Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T. (2020). Connecting the Dots: Hypotheses Generation by Leveraging Semantic Shifts. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) Vol. 12085 LNAI (pp. 328-340). Switzerland: Springer.
    DOI Scopus1
    2020 Thilakaratne, K., Falkner, K., & Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T. (2020). Information extraction in digital libraries: First steps towards portability of lbdworkflow. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) (pp. 345-348). online: ACM.
    DOI Scopus1
    2020 Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T., Falkner, K., & Thilakaratne, K. (2020). Garbage in, garbage out? an empirical look at information richness of lbd input types. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) (pp. 369-372). online: ACM.
    DOI
    2018 Thilakaratne, M., Falkner, K., & Atapattu, T. (2018). Automatic detection of cross-disciplinary knowledge associations. In ACL 2018 - 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop (pp. 45-51). online: Association for Computational Linguistics.
    DOI Scopus4
    2017 Thilakaratne, M., Weerasinghe, R., & Perera, S. (2017). Knowledge-Driven Approach to Predict Personality Traits by Leveraging Social Media Data. In J. E. Guerrero (Ed.), Proceedings - 2016 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, WI 2016 (pp. 288-295). Piscataway, New Jersey, USA: IEEE.
    DOI Scopus5
    2016 Thilakaratne, K. M., Weerasinghe, R., & Perera, S. (2016). Knowledge Driven Approach to Predict Personality Traits by Leveraging Social Media Data. In Proceedings of 2016 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI) (pp. 288-295). online: IEEE.
    DOI WoS5
  • "Contextually Situated Anomaly Detection" ($100,000)

     funded by Defence Innovation Partnership

     in collaboration with the Deakin University, Australia

 

  • "MindSpace – a Fitbit for language" ($10,000)

     funded by the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources

     in collabotation with the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka

 

  • "Automated glossary generation for effective information extraction from COVID-19 related scientific articles" ($20,000)

     funded by Defence Innovation Partnership

 

Grant Shortlisted:

 

  • "SCANN: Security Classification using Artificial Neural Networks" ($273,960)

     Finalist of the National Intelligence Postdoctoral Grant (NIPG)

 

 

Course Coordinator & Teaching:

  • COMP SCI 7210: Foundations of Computer Science Python A (Trimester 1, 2, & 3 - 2022)
  • COMP SCI 7211: : Foundations of Computer Science Python B  (Trimester 1, 2, & 3 - 2022)
  • COMP SCI 7317: Using Machine Learning Tools PG (Trimester 2 - 2022)
  • COMP SCI 7210: Foundations of Computer Science Python A (Semester 2 - 2021)
  • COMP SCI 7211: Foundations of Computer Science Python B (Semester 2 - 2021)

Curriculum Development:

  • Project Lead: COMP SCI 7210: Foundations of Computer Science Python A (For Trimester teaching - 2022)
  • Project Lead: COMP SCI 7211: Foundations of Computer Science Python B  (For Trimester teaching - 2022)
  • COMP SCI 7317: Using Machine Learning Tools PG (For Trimester teaching - 2022)

Teaching:

  • COMP SCI 7327: Concepts in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (Trimester 1 - 2022)

Teaching Philosopy:

The main philosophy that underpins my teaching is based on student-centred methods. This helps students engage through immersive, realistic and project-based learning activities, enabling them to participate in an applied and motivating learning context. This helps students delve deeply and explore course topics, while also obtaining an in-depth understanding and long-term retention of the course content.

I am a huge fan of the flipped classroom approach, using online modules to deliver pre-classroom information-based content such as short video clips, notes, embedded quizzes, and other interactive content. This enables the students to pre-engage and think about the topics and to attend classes equipped with some sufficient understanding of information. In this way, we provide them with the opportunity to meaningfully interact and engage during face-to-face times such as workshops. This also allows them to develop extended concepts during the workshops, while further deepening their understanding of the course content. Throughout this process, I also ensure that every interaction that happens in the classroom supports a positive and inclusive learning environment.

 

Certifications:

  • Learning to Teach Online by UNSW Sydney (The University of New South Wales)
  • University Teaching by The University of Hong Kong
  • Blended Language Learning: Design and Practice for Teachers by University of Colorado Boulder
  • Inclusive Online Teaching Teach-Out by Johns Hopkins University
  • Resilient Teaching Through Times of Crisis and Change by University of Michigan
  • Online education: The foundations of online teaching by Macquarie University
  • Instructional Design Foundations and Applications by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (in progress)
  • Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Curriculum by Commonwealth Education Trust (in progress)

  • Current Higher Degree by Research Supervision (University of Adelaide)
    Date Role Research Topic Program Degree Type Student Load Student Name
    2022 Co-Supervisor Cyberbullying Causes Detection and Model Advancement through User Knowledge Integration Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Isuru Mahagani Arachchige

  • Other Supervision Activities
    Date Role Research Topic Location Program Supervision Type Student Load Student Name
    2022 - ongoing Principal Supervisor Classifying Argumentative Structures in Student Writing University of Adelaide - Honours - Olivia Florence Byrnes
    2022 - ongoing Principal Supervisor Exploring outlier-detection techniques to detect fake news University of Adelaide - Honours - Jacob Thomas Schwarz
    2022 - ongoing Co-Supervisor Student Writing Evaluation using Explainable AI University of Adelaide - Doctorate - Abhilash Sridhara
    2021 - ongoing Co-Supervisor PRISMA Methodology The University of Adelaide - Other - Dasuni Jayawickrama (Research Assistant)
    2021 - ongoing Co-Supervisor Masters of Computing & Innovation (MCI) projects The University of Adelaide - Master - 12 Masters Students
    2021 - ongoing Co-Supervisor Emotion-trigger extraction from unstructured text The University of Adelaide - Honours - Dasuni Jayawickrama (Advanced Topics Student)
    2021 - ongoing Co-Supervisor Emotion-cause modeling from Natural Language text The University of Adelaide - Honours - Georgia Zhang (Honours in Computer Science Student)
    2020 - 2021 Co-Supervisor Systematic literature review on emotion-cause extraction from unstructured text The University of Adelaide - Other - Dasuni Jayawickrama (Research Assistant)

  • Mentoring
    Date Topic Location Name
    2022 - ongoing Multi Task Learning University of Adelaide Ankit Yadav
    2021 - ongoing Adobe Analytics Challenge 2021 The University of Adelaide Ankit Yadav

  • Memberships
    Date Role Membership Country
    2022 - ongoing Member STEM Women Australia

  • Review, Assessment, Editorial and Advice
    Date Title Type Institution Country
    2022 - ongoing Transactions on Learning Technologies Peer Review IEEE -
    2021 - ongoing Scientometrics (SCIM) Peer Review Springer Journals -
    2020 - ongoing Bioinformatics Peer Review Oxford Academic -
Connect With Me
External Profiles