Prof. Saman Halgamuge
Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering
School of Electrical Mechanical and Infrastructure Engineering
University of Melbourne
Australia

Prof Saman Halgamuge, Fellow of IEEE, IET and AAIA, received the B.Sc. Engineering degree in Electronics and Telecommunication from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, and the Dipl.-Ing and Ph.D. degrees in data engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He is currently a Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the School of Electrical Mechanical and Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne (UoM). He served as a Distinguished visiting Professor of Universities in Singapore, Malaysia, China, Sri Lanka and Indonesia and also held Prof V. K. Samaranayake endowed visiting professorship at UCSC, University of Colombo. He is listed as a top 2% most cited researcher for AI and Image Processing in the Stanford database. He was a distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (2018-21). He supervised 50 PhD students and 16 postdocs in Australia to completion. His research is funded by Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, US DoD Biomedical Research program and International industry. His previous leadership roles include Head, School of Engineering at ANU and Associate Dean of the Engineering and IT school of UoM.

Dr. Rajitha Navarathna
Principal Data Scientist
OCTAVE
John Keells Group
Sri Lanka

Dr. Rajitha Navarathna, a former Imagineer at Walt Disney Imagineering within The Walt Disney Company in the USA, currently serves as the Principal Data Scientist at OCTAVE, the John Keells Group Centre of Excellence for Big Data analytics. Prior to this role, he led AI teams at 99x and was the Lead Data Scientist at MIT.

From 2012 to 2019, Rajitha’s impactful career extended as an Imagineer at The Walt Disney Imagineering. Within the Research and Development team, he drove innovation through research publications and patented breakthroughs. In 2015/2016, his research contributed to the creation of a comprehensive data science lab at ABC media networks, focusing on understanding audience behavior. Rajitha’s research interests encompass computer vision, applied machine learning, facial tracking, facial expression recognition, and modeling machine vision systems capable of interpreting the world through extensive vision data. He earned a BSc Engineering degree with First Class Honors from the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka and completed his PhD in computer vision at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia in 2013.

Rajitha’s global impact spans collaborations with organizations like CSIRO, QUT, AutoCRC in Australia, Walt Disney Imagineering in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, ABC media networks in Seattle, USA and USA, Disney Research Zurich in Switzerland. He has published around 30 academic papers and holds several US patents.

Beyond his industrial accomplishments, Rajitha is deeply passionate about mentoring research students. He has dedicated his time to guiding research students from various universities in Sri Lanka, as well as master's and PhD students from the USA, Australia, Canada, and Switzerland.

Prof. David Hunter
Professor of Statistics
Penn State University
USA

David Hunter is a professor of statistics at Penn State University and has directed Penn State’s newly-formed AI Hub since March 2023.  He served as head of the Department of Statistics from 2012 to 2018 and has been heavily involved in developing Penn State’s data science programs.  He is a fellow of both the American Statistical Association and the Institute for Mathematical Statistics and is best known for work in three areas:  Statistical algorithms, most notably the class known as MM algorithms; statistical modeling of networks; and mixture models, particularly finite mixtures in which the component distributions are not parametrically specified.

Ms. Devini Senaratna

Senior Data Scientist
Meta (Formerly Facebook)
London, UK

Devini Senaratna is a Data Scientist with over a decade of experience with industry giants, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Booking.com, as well as successful stints in two machine learning startups. She has held several senior positions, managing as well as individually contributing and has worked across three continents: North America, Asia and Europe. Her expertise spans the areas of machine learning, causal inference, experimentation and natural language understanding. Devini holds a BSc in Statistics from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka and a MSc in Statistics from Stanford University, USA. She has earned multiple awards and accolades including the Gold Medal for the Most Outstanding Science Student of 2010, University of Colombo and the Exceptional Global Talent Endorsement by TechNation, UK in 2023.

Senior Professor (Chair) H.D. Karunaratne
Vice Chancellor
University of Colombo

Senior Professor (Chair) Prof. Upul Sonnadara
Dean
Faculty of Science
University of Colombo

Dr. Rushan Abeygunawardana
Head
Department of Statistics
Faculty of Science
University of Colombo