Dr A. R. Weerasinghe

Academic Record :

• BSc in Math and Statistics (Colombo) 1983
• MSc in Computing (Cardiff) 1990
• PhD in Natural Language Processing (Cardiff) 1994

Awards & Distinctions 

• Department of Mathematics, University of Colombo – V.W. Samaranayake award for best Statistics student of the year – 1983.
• European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics – Research Fellowship for undertaking research into text alignment techniques at INRIA, France – 2000.
• US-Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission – Senior Scholar Fellowship for undertaking research into statistical machine translation techniques at Carnegie-Mellon University, USA – 2001. 

Research interests :

• Natural Language Processing/ Computational Linguistics/ Human Language Technology
  - Machine Translation and Text Alignment
  - Statistical and Corpus Based methods
  - Speech Processing
• Agent Technology
• Web-based Technologies

Publications:

• Weerasinghe, Ruvan (2002). Bootstrapping the Lexicon Building Process for Machine Translation between `New' Languages. Proceedings of the 5th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA 2002 Tiburon, CA, USA. Pp. 177-186.
• Abeywardene, A.M.D.V. and Weerasinghe A.R. (2000). A multi-agent framework for mobile agents. Proceedings of the 3rd International Information Technology Conference (IITC’00), Colombo, Sri Lanka. pp 25.
• Jayalath, J.A.N.S. and Weerasinghe, A.R. (2000). An Off-line Internet agent for searching documents based on English descriptions. Proceedings of the 3rd International Information Technology Conference (IITC’00), Colombo, Sri Lanka. pp. 27.
• Senanayake, R., Weerasinghe, A.R. and Kodikara, N.D. (2000). A platform independent virtual reality graphical user interface. Proceedings of the 3rd International Information Technology Conference (IITC’00), Colombo, Sri Lanka.
• Mohanaraja, R. and Weerasinghe, A.R. (1998). An English to Tamil translator’s workbench. Poster paper at the International Information Technology Conference 1998, In Proceedings of IITC’98, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
• De Zoysa, T.N.K and Weerasinghe A.R. (1998). A network friendly search engine for the internet. Proceedings of the Multi-disciplinary International Conferece on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Independence of Sri Lanka, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
• Habarakada, S and Weerasinghe A.R. (1998). DBPP: A database publishing protocol for the world wide web. Proceedings of the Multi-disciplinary International Conferece on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Independence of Sri Lanka, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
• Keppitiyagama, C. and Weerasinghe A.R. (1998). Case study in employing digital signal processing and probabilistic pattern matching techniques for computer based speech recognition. Proceedings of the Multi-disciplinary International Conferece on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Independence of Sri Lanka, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
• Jayalal, D.A. and Weerasinghe, A.R. (1997). Towards the development of a grammar checker for sinhala. Proceedings of the 16th National Information Technology Conference of the Computer Society of Sri Lanka, Colombo, Sri Lanka. pp 24-31.
• Seher I. and Weerasinghe A.R. (1997). An English to SQL translator for database querying. In Proceedings of the 16th National Information Technology Conference of the Computer Society of Sri Lanka, Colombo, Sri Lanka. pp 43-53.
• Wijeyaratnam A.C.A. and Weerasinghe A.R. (1997). A foundation for a parallel processing environment. In Proceedings of the 16th National Information Technology Conference of the Computer Society of Sri Lanka, Colombo, Sri Lanka. pp 88-103.
• Premaratne H.L. and Weerasinghe A.R. (1996). A Neural Network Approach to Image Compression and Transmission. In Proceedings of the 15th National Information Technology Conference of the Computer Society of Sri Lanka, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
• Athukorala D.A.S. and Weerasinghe A.R. (1996). A Pascal to C Translator. In Proceedings of the 15th National Information Technology Conference of the Computer Society of Sri Lanka, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
• Rajapakse R.K., Seneviratne E.K. and Weerasinghe A.R. (1996) A Neural Network approach to recognising Sinhala Script. In Proceedings of the South East Asian Regional Computer Confederation (SEARCC’96) Conference, Bangkok, Thailand.
• Weerasinghe A.R. (1995). A ‘Head-Outward’ Parsing strategy for systemic functional grammar. In Proceedings of SEARCC’95, Colombo, Sri Lanka. pp 192-202.
• Weerasinghe A.R. (1995). The Local Language Initiative: Some preliminaries to multi-language processing. ELSNET Summer School on Language and Speech Communication : Multilinguality, University of Edinburgh, UK.
• Weerasinghe A.R. (1994). Using a probablistic parsing scheme for a systemic functional grammar. ELSNET Summer School on Language and Speech Communication : Corpus-based Methods, OTS, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
• Weerasinghe A.R. (1994) Probabilistic parsing in Systemic Functional Grammar. PhD. Thesis, Department  of Computing Mathematics, University of Wales College of Cardiff, UK.
• Weerasinghe A.R. (1994). A 'head-outward' probabilistic parsing strategy for systemic functional grammar. 3rd International Conference on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing, Dublin City University, Ireland.
• Weerasinghe A.R. and Fawcett R.P. (1993). Probabilistic incremental parsing in systemic functional grammar. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, pp 351-367. ACL - SIGPARSE conference, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands.
• Weerasinghe A.R. (1991) “A Probabilistic Functional Parser”. Poster presentation at the Postgraduate Workshop for AI researchers held at AISB’93 in Birmingham, UK.
• Weerasinghe A.R. (1990)  A chart parsing approach to building a systemic parser for a non-trivial subset of English. Proceedings of the Eleventh National Computer Conference of Sri Lanka, Colombo, Sri Lanka. pp 131-143.
• Weerasinghe A.R. A chart parsing approach to building a systemic parser for a non-trivial subset of English. Msc. Dissertaion, Department  of Computing Mathematics, University of Wales College of Cardiff, UK.
• Liyanage A.De S. and Weerasinghe A.R. (1984). A Crop-Weather Calendar for Rubber. Proceedings of the International Rubber Conference, Colombo, Sri Lanka. pp 354-366

Presentations

Workshops and Seminars Conducted

• Seminar on “An experiment using Statistical Machine Translation on small and messy corpora” at the Rapidly Adaptable Data-Driven Machine Translation Research Group at the School of Computer Science of the Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Oct. 2002.
• Seminar on “Why the Translate Button Does not work (yet)” at the Computer Science Research Seminar Series conducted by the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the San Jose State University, San Jose, California. Mar. 2002.
• Seminar on “Non-knowledge intensive text alignment and beyond”, Séminaire de l’équipe du LED à La Bresse at INRIA, Nancy, France. Jan. 2001.
• Lecturer, Full-day workshop on “Java and XML” at the International Information Technology Conference (IITC’00), Colombo, Sri Lanka. (http://www.lanka.net/iitc2000/workshops.html#Java and XML) Jul. 2000.
• Resource Person, “Internet Information Services” Track of the Internet Society’s Network Technology Workshop. July 2000, Yokohama, Japan. (http://www.t3.isocws.isoc.org/www/html/home/start.htm) Jun. 1999.
• Instructor, “Network Navigation and Services” Track of the Internet Society’s Network Technology Workshop. June 1999, San Jose, USA. (http://www.isocws.isoc.org/) Jul. 1998.
• Instructor, “Network Navigation and Services” Track of the Internet Society’s Network Training Workshop. July 1998, Geneva, Switzerland. (http://www.isocws.isoc.org/) Jun. 1997.
• Instructor, “Network Navigation and Services” Track of the Internet Society’s Network Technology Workshop. June 1997, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia. (http://www.isocws.isoc.org/).

Other Presentations

• “IT and Information: Convergence or Divergence”. Presented at the IFLA/SLLA International Workshop on Networking for Effective Library and Information Services, held in Colombo, Sri Lanka. July 1999
• “Organising the Web with XML”. Presented at the LEARN seminar on Internet Technology, National Science Foundation (NARESA), Sri Lanka. July 1997
• “Caching and Indexing of Web Sites”. Presented at the LEARN seminar on Internet Technology, University of Sri Jayawardenapura, Sri Lanka. June 1997
• “Delivering Dynamic Web Content”. Presented at the seminar to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the ICT in Colombo, Sri Lanka. April 1995
• “The World Wide Web : Traversing the Internet”. Presented at the seminar on Enhancing Business Efficiency through Voice and Data Communication Facilities organised by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Jan. 1995
• “The Internet - A World Wide Web”. Presentation made at NETCON’95 at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. July 1993
• “Strategies for parsing Systemic Functional Grammar”. Presentation made at the Postgraduate Research Seminar Series of the IKBS Group, Department of Computing Mathematics, University of Wales College of Cardiff, UK.

Experience

Teaching

Undergraduate:

• Program Design and Programming
• Logic Programming and Prolog
• Compilers and Automata Theory
• Intelligent Systems

Postgraduate:

• Advanced Data Structures and Algorithms
• Intelligent Systems
• Natural Language Processing

Other activities

• Coordinator of the MSc in Computer Science 1996 - 2001
• Visiting Lecturer and External Examiner for many university courses in Sri Lanka
• Involved in setting up the University of Colombo network and its Network Operations Centre
• Member of the Sri Lanka Inter University Computer Committee
• Founder member of the Lanka Education And Research Network management committee
• Member of the CINTEC Internet Committee
• Member and Chairman of the Sri Lanka IOI committee and Team Leader of the IOI team
• Member of the Organising and Papers Committees of IITC's
• Paper referee for many IT and CS conferences and Symposia
• University of Colombo Representative of the Sida-IT project
• University of Colombo Representative on the IT Standing Committee of the UGC
• Founder member of the Sri Lanka Association for Artificial Intelligence
• Coordinator of the current MSc in Advanced Computing program conducted by UCSC

Personal

You can find a somewhat outdated personal site on Yahoo Geocities...

Contact Information

Phone :2581245-7, 2589123 (Ext 440)