Lakmal Meegahapola

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. Catherine Jutzeler. I got my PhD in Electrical Engineering from EPFL in February 2024, advised by Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez, and the thesis won an EPFL EDEE PhD Thesis Distinction Award 🌟. My research focus is at the intersection of ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, digital health, and responsible AI/ML.

Previously, I was a Student Researcher at Google Research (Mountain View, CA, USA) working with Dr. Venky Ramachandran, Dr. Kai Kohlhoff, and Dr. Vidhya Navalpakkam; a Research Intern at Nokia Bell Labs (Cambridge, UK) working with Prof. Daniele Quercia and Dr. Michael Eggleston; and a Visiting Researcher at the Mobile Systems Group of University of Cambridge, hosted by Prof. Cecilia Mascolo. Before starting my PhD, I worked as a Research Engineer at SMU-CMU Living Analytics Research Centre at SMU Singapore, advised by Prof. Archan Misra. I got my BSc in Computer Science and Engineering with a 1st class from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka in January 2018.

I am an editorial board member of the IEEE Pervasive Computing journal, and an Associate Chair of the ACM CHI conference. I have also been part of the program committee of ACM ICMI, ACM ISWC, ACM Ubicomp Workshops, and ACM CHI Workshops, among other venues. I've reviewed over 50 papers for venues/journals such as ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp), ACM HEALTH, ACM Computing Surveys, ACM CHI, and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

For my work, I was 🏆 named one of the top four for Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award at ACM Ubicomp 2023, 🏆 recognized as a Rising Star in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in 2024, and 🏆 selected as a Young Researcher at 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2024. Our work has 🏆 won a Distinguished Paper Award at ACM IMWUT 2023, 🏆 the Special Recognition for Sustainable Practices at ACM CHI 2024, 🏆 awarded a President's Award for Scientific Research from the Sri Lankan President, among other awards. My work has also been recognized at prestigious events such as Microsoft Imagine Cup World Finals, Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA), and National Best Quality ICT Awards (NBQSA, Sri Lanka) and has been covered by local and international press. Further, I was a member of the Sri Lankan International Olympiad team for Astrophysics.

NOTE: If you are a self-motivated master/exchange student at ETH Zurich or EPFL interested in a semester/thesis project on using machine/deep learning for research in areas such as healthcare, biomedical engineering, or mobile/wearable sensing, feel free to drop me an email.

I have studied at:

I have worked at:

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News

2024 October	🏆 My PhD thesis was awarded an EPFL PhD Thesis Distinction for 2024, given to 8% of outstanding PhD thesis completed at EPFL during the year. 4 out of 60 theses were awarded in Electrical Engineering.
2024 September	Joined EDGE-WELL at IEEE Percom 2025, as a program committee member.
2024 August	Joined IEEE PerCom 2025 as a program committee member.
2024 July	Gave talks at Google 🇺🇸 and Nokia Bell Labs 🇬🇧.
2024 July	Gave a talk at the Computer Science Department of the University of Melbourne 🇦🇺.
2024 April	Joined ACM CHI 2025 as an Associate Chair.
2024 April	💵 Received the Young Investigator Grant (80,000 CHF) from Novartis Foundation to develop fair, robust, and human-centered AI models for healthcare. My first grant as a PI.
2024 April	🏆 Our ACM CHI 2024 paper won the Special Recognition for Sustainable Practices, given to 2 out of 1058 accepted papers at the conference.
2024 February	Gave a talk to the IICU consortium at the University of Zurich 🇨🇭.
2024 April	We are organizing FairComp 2024 at this year's ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2024 to be held in Melbourne, Australia. Consider submitting your work!
2024 April	🏆 Selected as a "Young Researcher" to take part in the "11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum" to be held in Heidelberg, Germany in September 2024, where great laureates in computing and math will gather.
2024 April	🏆 Selected as one of the "Rising Stars in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)" by ACM SIGBED, NSF, and the University of Virginia (UvA), USA. The workshop and the award ceremony will take place at UvA Charlottesville campus this May.
2024 April	Paper titled "M3BAT: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Multimodal Mobile Sensing with Multi-Branch Adversarial Training" has been accepted at Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT) journal. It will be presented at ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2024 to be held in Melbourne, Australia.
2024 March	Joined the Program Committee of 28th ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) 2024.
2024 March	Joined the Program Committee of 12th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII) 2024.
2024 March	Joined the Program Committee of 26th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI).
2024 February	Paper titled "Learning about Social Context from Smartphone Data: Generalization Across Countries and Daily Life Moments" has been accepted at ACM Conference on Human-Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2024 to be held in Hawaii, USA.
2024 February	Gave a talk at the University of Lausanne 🇨🇭.
2024 January	🏆 Awarded a "Special Recognition for Outstanding Reviews" for my review at the ACM IMWUT journal, in the November 2023 review cycle.
2023 December	Joined the Editorial Board of IEEE Pervasive Computing journal.
2023 October	🏆 Received the "President's Award for Scientific Research", awarded by his excellency the President of Sri Lanka, for a paper titled Change Detection and Notification of Web Pages: A Survey, published at ACM Computing Surveys. This work stemmed from our bachelor's thesis work at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Congrats to all the amazing authors!
2023 October	Defended my PhD at EPFL! The thesis is titled "Generalization and Personalization of Machine Learning for Multimodal Mobile Sensing in Everyday Life".
2023 July	🏆 Recieved a "Special Recognition for Outstanding Reviews" for four of my reviews at the ACM CHI 2024 conference.
2023 October	🏆 Paper titled "Generalization and Personalization of Mobile Sensing-Based Mood Inference Models: An Analysis of College Students in Eight Countries" won the Distinguished Paper Award at ACM UbiComp 2023.
2023 October	🏆 An absolute privilege to have been named a finalist (top 4) for the ACM UbiComp Outstanding Student Award (Gaetano Borriello Award) at ACM UbiComp 2023, held in Cancun, Mexico. This award recognizes “𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗶𝗻, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗲𝗹𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝘂𝗯𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴”, from graduate students across the world.
2023 April	Paper titled "Understanding the Social Context of Eating with Multimodal Smartphone Sensing: The Role of Country Diversity" has been accepted at 25th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) to be held in Paris, France.
2023 July	🏆 Recieved "Special Recognition for Outstanding Reviews" for my reviews at the 25th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) 2023.
2023 June	Joined the technical program committees of WellComp and FairComp workshops at ACM Ubicomp 2023, to be held in Cancun, Mexico. Consider submitting your work!
2024 May	Gave a talk at ETH Zurich 🇨🇭.
2024 May	Gave a talk at the University of Oxford (Virtually) 🇬🇧.
2024 May	Gave a talk at the Swiss Data Science Center 🇨🇭.
2023 April	Paper titled "Multimodal Earable Sensing for Human Energy Expenditure Estimation" has been accepted at 45th IEEE EMBC 2023 to be held in Sydney, Australia. This is a joint work with Yasith, Darshana, Thilina and Indika Perera of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Moratuwa.
2023 April	Joined the technical program committee of ISWC 2023 (27th International Symposium on Wearable Computers, co-located with Ubicomp). Consider submitting briefs and notes!
2023 April	🏆 Recieved "Special Recognition for Outstanding Reviews" for my reviews at the ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp) journal, for the review cycle in February 2023.
2023 February	Gave a talk titled "Mobile Sensing and Machine Learning for Health and Well-being: From Personalization to Generalization" at the University of Lausanne.
2023 January	Two first author papers have been accepted at ACM CHI 2023. The first paper, "Quantified Canine 🐕" is from the work I did during my 2022 summer internship at Nokia Bell Labs. With an in-the-wild study, this paper explores the feasibility of using wearables and machine learning to understand dog behavior and personality. The second paper, "Complex Daily Activities, Country-Level Diversity and Smartphone Sensing 🏃" is from the WeNet – The Internet of Us project (w/ Karim Assi co-primary -- an extension of his EPFL semester project). This paper uses smartphone sensor data from over 600 college students in five countries to study activities of daily living.
2022 December	🏆 Received "Special Recognition for Outstanding Reviews" two times at ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp) journal, for review cycles in May and November of 2022.
2022 November	Paper titled "Your Day in Your Pocket: Complex Activity Recognition from Smartphone Accelerometers" got accepted to the 16th EAI Pervasive Health 2022 conference , to be held in Thessaloniki, Greece in December. This paper is based on Emma Bouton--Bessac's EPFL MS thesis project.
2022 October	Paper titled "Generalization and Personalization of Mobile Sensing Based Mood Inference Models: An Analysis of Eight Countries" got accepted to the ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp) journal . This is a collaborative work done with partners of the EU Horizon 2020 project WENET.
2023 February	Gave a plenary talk titled "Mobile Sensing and Machine Learning for Health and Well-being: From Personalization to Generalization" at ICAPS 2022 Conference at the University of Kelaniya.
2022 September	Joined Google Research (Mountain View, CA, USA) as a Research Intern for the fall of 2022. I am working on an exciting project at the intersection of mobile sensing and machine learning.
2022 June	Joined the technical program committee (TPC) of WellComp 2022 workshop, which will be held at Cambridge, UK (and remote) on the 15th of September 2022, during the ACM UbiComp 2022 conference. Please consider submitting your work!
2022 June	Joined Nokia Bell Labs (Cambridge, UK) as a Research Intern for the summer of 2022. I am working on an exciting project at the intersection of wearable sensing, behavioral and mental health, and machine learning.
2022 May	Paper titled "Sensing Eating Events in Context: A Smartphone Only Approach" got accepted to the IEEE Access journal (Impact Factor: 3.75) . This is a collaborative work done with University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka and IPICYT, Mexico.
2022 March	Accepted an offer to join Google Research (Mountain View, CA, USA) as a Student Researcher/Research Intern for the fall of 2022. Looking forward to working on an exciting project at the intersection of smartphone sensing and machine learning.
2022 March	Accepted an offer to join Nokia Bell Labs (Cambridge, UK) as a Research Intern for the summer of 2022. Looking forward to working on an exciting project at the intersection of wearable sensing, signal processing, and machine learning.
2022 February	Gave an invited talk on "Smartphone Sensing for Healthcare" at the Digitalization Week of the University of Lausanne (UNIL), Switzerland. It was an exciting opportunity to talk to people from a range of backgrounds incl. law, social science, and ethics about how AI & sensing impact our lives and privacy.
2021 December	I will be starting as a Visiting Researcher at Mobile Systems Group of the University of Cambridge! I will work with Cecilia Mascolo at the intersection of smartphone sensing, machine learning, and mental health.
2021 December	Gave a talk on the topic "Smartphone Sensing for the Well-being of Young Adults" at the KnowDive Seminars Series organized by the Knowdive Group of the University of Trento, Italy. Video of the talk can be found here.
2021 October	🏆 Chosen as a nominee from EPFL for the IBM PhD Fellowship 2022 under the topic "Secure and Trusted AI".
2021 September	Presented two papers (One More Bite , Social Context of Drinking ) at this years ACM Ubicomp 2021 conference.
2021 April	Paper titled "Examining the Social Context of Alcohol Drinking in Young Adults with Smartphone Sensing" got accepted to the ACM IMWUT journal. This work will be presented at the ACM UbiComp 2021 conference.
2021 April	Paper titled "The Theory, Practice, and Ethical Challenges of Designing a Diversity-Aware Platform for Social Relations" has been accepted to the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) 2021. This collaborative work was done as part of the "WeNet – The Internet of Us" project, with wonderful colleagues from the University of Tuebingen, University of Trento, Aalborg University, EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), Idiap Research Institute, and IPICyT.
2021 April	Paper titled "Ten Seconds of My Nights: Exploring Different Methods to Measure Brightness, Loudness and Attendance and Their Associations with Alcohol Use using Short Video Clips" got accepted to the PLOS ONE journal. This work was a collaboration between EPFL and Idiap Research Institute (Switzerland), Addiction Switzerland (Switzerland), and La Trobe University (Australia).
2021 January	Paper titled "One More Bite? Inferring Food Consumption Level of College Students using Smartphone Sensing and Self-Reports" has been accepted for publication at ACM IMWUT journal. The paper will also be presented at UbiComp 2021. This work was a collaboration between EPFL and Idiap Research Institute (Switzerland), IPICYT (Mexico), and University of Trento (Italy).
2020 December	Paper titled "Smartphone Sensing for the Well-being of Young Adults: A Review" has been accepted for publication at IEEE Access journal (impact factor 3.745 in 2019)
2020 October	Paper titled "Alone or With Others? Understanding Eating Episodes of College Students with Mobile Sensing" has been accepted to the 19th ACM Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) 2020. Acceptance rate is 39%.
2020 October	Paper titled "Protecting Mobile Food Diaries from Getting to Personal" has been accepted to the 19th ACM Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) 2020. Acceptance rate is 39%.
2020 September	Paper titled "Jointly Optimizing Sensing Pipelines for Multimodal Mixed Reality Interaction" has been accepted to the 17th IEEE Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS) 2020. This work was done in collaboration with Singapore Management University, Singapore and University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Acceptance rate is 30%.
2020 June	Happy to announce that I passed my candidacy exam at the School of Engineering, EPFL. Thanks a lot Daniel and colleagues at EPFL & Idiap for your advice and support.
2020 February	🏆 Selected as an "Exemplary Reviewer" of IEEE Wireless Communications Letters journal for the year 2019 for the high-quality review work.
2020 February	Attended WENET Project meeting at University of Trento, Italy.
2019 November	Paper titled "PokeME: Applying Context-Driven Notifications to Increase Worker Engagement in Mobile Crowd-sourcing" was accepted to ACM SIGIR CHIIR 2020.
2019 November	Paper titled "Change Detection and Notification of Webpages: A Survey" was accepted to ACM Computing Surveys - The ACM Journal with highest impact factor.
2019 October	I attended the WeNet project meeting at Institut d'Investigació en Intel·ligència Artificial (IIIA-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain.
2019 June	Paper titled "Inferring Accurate Bus Trajectories from Noisy Estimated Arrival Time Records" was accepted to IEEE ITSC 2019.
2019 June	Joined EPFL, Switzerland as a Doctoral Student. I will be working with by Daniel Gatica-Perez. During my PhD, I will work as a Research Assistant in the Social Computing Group of EPFL and Idiap Research Institute.
2019 March	Paper titled "BuSCOPE : Fusing Individual and Aggregated Mobility Behaviorfor "Live" Smart City Services" was accepted to ACM MobiSys 2019.
2019 March	I was offered admission to PhD in Computer Science at University of Cambridge, UK.
2019 February	I was offered admission to PhD in Engineering at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).
2018 October	I attended UbiComp 2018 conference held in Singapore.
2018 January	Joined SMU-CMU Living Analytics Research Centre at Singapore Management University (SMU) ,Singapore as a Research Engineer. I will be supervised by Archan Misra.
2018 January	I graduated from University of Moratuwa, with a 1st class honours degree in Computer Science and Engineering.

Education

EPFL, Switzerland

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Electrical Engineering

Thesis: Generalization and Personalization of Machine Learning for Multimodal Mobile Sensing in Everyday Life

Advised by: Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez

June 2019 - February 2024

University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Engineering

Major: Computer Science and Engineering

Thesis: Change Detection and Notification of Web Pages

Advised by: Prof. Dulani Meedeniya, Prof. Sampath Jayarathna

January 2014 - January 2018

Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), United Kingdom

Professional Qualification (CIMA Passed Finalist)

Major: Management Accounting

August 2012 - January 2015

Experience

ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Postdoctoral Researcher @ Biomedical Data Science Group

December 2023 - Present

Google, Mountain View, CA, USA

Student Researcher @ Google Research

September 2022 - December 2022

Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, UK

Research Intern @ AI Research Lab

June 2022 - August 2022

University of Cambridge, UK

Visiting Researcher @ Mobile Systems Group

January 2022 - August 2022

Idiap Research Institute & School of Engineering, EPFL, Switzerland

Research Assistant @ Social Computing Group

June 2019 - November 2024

SMU-CMU Living Analytics Research Centre, Singapore

Research Engineer @ Ubiquitous & Mobile Computing Group

December 2017 - May 2019

Innoscripta GmbH, Germany

Software Engineering Intern

January 2016 - December 2017

Selected Publications

2024

M3BAT: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Multimodal Mobile Sensing with Multi-Branch Adversarial Training
L. Meegahapola, H. Hassoune , D. Gatica-Perez
ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/ Ubicomp), 2024

Learning about Social Context from Smartphone Data: Generalization Across Countries and Daily Life Moments
L. Meegahapola*, A.R. Mader*, D. Gatica-Perez (*: Co-Primary)
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2024

2023

Understanding the Social Context of Eating with Multimodal Smartphone Sensing: The Role of Country Diversity
N. Kammoun, L. Meegahapola, D. Gatica-Perez
25th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), 2023

Keep Sensors in Check: Disentangling Country-Level Generalization Issues in Mobile Sensor-Based Models with Diversity Scores
A. Nanchen, L. Meegahapola, W. Droz, D. Gatica-Perez
6th AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), 2023

Multimodal Earable Sensing for Human Energy Expenditure Estimation
Y. Amarasinghe†, D. Sandaruwan†, T. Madusanka†, I. Perera, L. Meegahapola (†: Co-Primary)
45th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2023

Quantified Canine: Inferring Dog Personality From Wearables
L. Meegahapola, M. Constantinides, Z. Radivojevic, H. Li, M. Eggleston, D. Quercia
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023

Complex Daily Activities, Country-Level Diversity and Smartphone Sensing: A Study in Denmark, Italy, Mongolia, Paraguay, and UK
L. Meegahapola*, K. Assi*, W. Droz, D. Gatica-Perez, et al. (*: Co-Primary)
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023

2022

Generalization and Personalization of Mobile Sensing Based Mood Inference Models: An Analysis of Eight Countries
L. Meegahapola, W. Droz, D. Gatica-Perez, et al.
ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/ Ubicomp), 2022

Sensing Eating Events in Context: A Smartphone-Only Approach
L. Meegahapola*, W. Bangamuarachchi*, A. Chamantha*, S. Ruiz-Correa, I. Perera, D. Gatica-Perez (*: Co-Primary)
IEEE Access, 2022 [Impact Factor: 3.75]

Your Day in Your Pocket: Complex Activity Recognition from Smartphone Accelerometers
E. Bouton--Bessac, L. Meegahapola, D. Gatica-Perez
16th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth), 2022

2021

Examining the Social Context of Alcohol Drinking in Young Adults with Smartphone Sensing
L. Meegahapola, F. Labhart, T.T. Phan and D. Gatica-Perez
ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/ Ubicomp), 2021

One More Bite? Inferring Food Consumption Level of College Students using Smartphone Sensing and Self-Reports
L. Meegahapola, S. Ruiz-Correa, V.C. Robledo-Valero, E.E. Hernandez-Huerfano, L. Alvarez-Rivera, R. Chenu-Abente, D. Gatica-Perez
ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/ Ubicomp), 2021

Smartphone Sensing for the Well-being of Young Adults: A Review
L. Meegahapola, D. Gatica-Perez
IEEE Access, 2021 [Impact Factor: 3.75]

The Theory, Practice, and Ethical Challenges of Designing a Diversity-Aware Platform for Social Relations
L. Schelenz, I. Bison, M. Busso, A. de Götzen, D. Gatica-Perez, F. Giunchiglia, L. Meegahapola and S. Ruiz-Correa
AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) 2021

Ten Seconds of My Nights: Exploring Different Methods to Measure Brightness, Loudness and Attendance and Their Associations with Alcohol Use using Short Video Clips
F. Labhart, L. Meegahapola*, S. Muralidhar*, B. Masse*, E. Kuntsche, D. Gatica-Perez (* = equal contribution)
PLOS ONE, 2021 [Impact Factor: 3.24]

2020

Protecting Mobile Food Diaries from Getting too Personal
L. Meegahapola, S. Ruiz-Correa, D. Gatica-Perez
ACM Conference on Mobile & Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM), Essen, Germany, 2020 [Acceptance Rate: 39%]

Alone or With Others? Understanding Eating Episodes of College Students with Mobile Sensing
L. Meegahapola, S. Ruiz-Correa, D. Gatica-Perez
ACM Conference on Mobile & Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM), Essen, Germany, 2020 [Acceptance Rate: 39%]

Change Detection and Notification of Webpages: A Survey
V. Mallawaarachchi, L. Meegahapola, R. Alwis, E. Nimalarathna, D. Meedeniya, S. Jayarathne
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 2020 [Impact Factor: 10.282]

Jointly Optimizing Sensing Pipelines for Multimodal Mixed Reality Interactions
D. Rathnayake, A.K. De Silva, D. Puwakdandawa, L. Meegahapola, A. Misra, I. Perera
IEEE Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS), Delhi, India, 2020 [Acceptance Rate: 30%]

PokeME: Applying Context-Driven Notifications to Increase Worker Engagement in Mobile Crowd-sourcing
T. Kandappu, A. Mehrotra, A. Misra, M. Musolesi, S.F. Cheng, L. Meegahapola
ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), British Columbia, Canada, 2020 [Acceptance Rate: 38%]

2019 or earlier

BuSCOPE: Fusing Individual \& Aggregated Mobility Behavior for ``Live'' Smart City Services
L. Meegahapola, T. Kandappu, K. Jayarajah, L. Akoglu, S. Xiang, A. Misra
ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), South Korea, 2019 [Acceptance Rate: 22.6%]

Inferring Accurate Bus Trajectories from Noisy Estimated Arrival Time Records
L. Meegahapola, N. Athaide, K. Jayarajah, S. Xiang, A. Misra
IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), Auckland, New Zealand, 2019

Can Multimodal Sensing Detect and Localize Transient Events?
K. Jayarajah, V. Subbaraju, N. Athaide, L. Meegahapola , A. Tan, and A. Misra
SPIE Defence + Commercial Sensing, Orlando, USA, 2018

Random Forest Classifier based Scheduler Optimization for Search Engine Web Crawlers
L. Meegahapola, R.M. Alwis, E.H. Nimalarathna, V.G. Mallawaarachchi, D. Meedeniya, S. Jayarathne
ACM International Conference on Software and Computer Applications (ICSCA), Kuantan, Malaysia, 2018

Cognitive Analysis of 360 Surround Photos
M. Vidanapathirana, L. Meegahapola, I. Perera
IEEE Future Technologies Conference (FTC), Vancouver, Canada, 2017 [Acceptance Rate: 30.4%]

Adaptive Technique for Web Page Change Detection using Multi-Threaded Crawlers
L. Meegahapola, R.M. Alwis, E.H. Nimalarathna, V.G. Mallawaarachchi, D. Meedeniya, S. Jayarathne
IEEE International Conference on Innovative Computing Technology (INTECH), London, United Kingdom, 2017 [Acceptance Rate: 34%]

Enhanced In-Store Shopping Experience through Smartphone based Mixed Reality Application
L. Meegahapola, I. Perera
IEEE International Conference on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions (ICTer), Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2017

Selected Awards & Achievements

International

EPFL PhD Thesis Distinction Award 2024

Young Investigator Grant Winner (80,000 CHF) - Novartis Foundation - 2024

Winner of "Special Recognition for Sustainable Practices" - ACM CHI 2024

Young Researcher in 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2024

Rising Star in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - Organized and/or Sponsored by ACM SIGBED, NSF, and the University of Virginia.

Outstanding Reviewer (x4) - ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp) 2022, 2023, 2024

President's Award for Scientific Research 2023 - Awarded by his excellency the President of Sri Lanka

Outstanding Reviewer (x4) - ACM CHI 2024

ACM Ubicomp Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award Finalist (Top Four) - ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2023

Distinguished Paper Award (1%) - ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp) 2023

Outstanding Reviewer - ACM ICMI 2023

IBM PhD Fellowship 2022 - EPFL Nominee

Exemplary Reviewer (3%) - IEEE Wireless Communications Letters Journal 2020

2nd place & $10000 - Microsoft Imagine Cup World Finals 2016 - Seattle, USA

Represented Sri Lanka - 5th International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA) 2011 - Katowice, Poland

Best Paper Award Finalist (1%) - 30^th ISCA CAINE 2017 - San Diego, USA

Best Paper Presentation of the Session- 7^th ACM ICSCA 2018 - Kuantan, Malaysia

1^st place (Media-Saturn track)- HackaTUM 2016- Munich, Germany

National (Sri Lanka)

1^st place & Gold medal - National Astrophysics Olympiad 2011

6^st place & Bronze medal - National Astrophysics Olympiad 2010

Bronze medal - National Physics Olympiad 2012

3^rd place & Bronze award in tertiary category - 18^th National Best Quality ICT Awards 2016

1^st place - Microsoft Imagine Cup National Finals 2016 (Innovation Category)

1^st place - Microsoft Imagine Cup National Finals 2016 (Games Category)

2^nd place - Microsoft Imagine Cup National Finals 2016 (World Citizenship Category)

2^nd place - Microsoft Imagine Cup National Finals 2017

1^st place - Google I/O Extended Hackathon 2015

1^st place - HackaDev 2015

1^st place - Yarl Geek Challenge 2015

1^st place - Ideamart Mora Hack 2015

Reviewing and Student Supervision

I am an editorial board member for the journal IEEE Pervasive Computing, an Associate Chair for ACM CHI, and have been a program committee member at ACM ISWC (International Symposium on Wearable Computing) (2023-present), ACII (2024-present), IEEE Percom (2025-present), and ACM ICMI (2023-present). I've also been a reviewer for top-tier journals such as ACM IMWUT, ACM Computing Surveys, ACM HEALTH, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and IEEE Wireless Communications Letters and conferences such as ACM CHI. I've also had the pleasure of working with the following exceptional undergraduate and masters students.

ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Youssef Farag - Scientific Assistant - 2024/09 to Present

Fanny Tranchellini - MS Thesis Project - 2024/04 to Present

Linus Werren - BSc Focus Project - 2024/09 to Present

Sofie Bolleter - BSc Focus Project - 2024/09 to Present

Tamara Schneider - BSc Focus Project - 2024/09 to Present

Christian Bertsch - BSc Lab Rotation Project - 2024/06 to 2024/08

EPFL, Switzerland

Zihao Wang - MS Thesis Project - 2024/03 to 2024/06

Hamza Hassoune - MS Computer Science - Semester Project - 2023/02 to 2023/06

Nathan Kammoun - MS Robotics and Data Science - Semester Project - 2022/02 to 2022/06

Assi Karim - MS Data Science - Semester Project - 2021/09 to 2022/02

Emma Bouton-Bessac - MS Robotics - Masters Thesis Project - 2021/09 - 2022/02

Aurel Ruben Mäder - MS Digital Humanities - Semester Project - 2021/09 - 2022/02

Haeeun Kim - MS Digital Humanities - Semester Project - 2021/04 to 2021/09

University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Dileesha Kannangara - BSc Electronic and Telecomminication Engineering - External Project - 2024/04 to Present

Chalindu Kodikara - BSc Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering - External Project - 2022/04 to Present

Yasith Amarasinghe - BSc Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering - Thesis Project - 2022/04 to 2023/05

Darshana Sandaruwan - BSc Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering - Thesis Project - 2022/04 to 2023/05

Thilina Madusanka - BSc Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering - Thesis Project - 2022/04 to 2023/05

Wageesha Bangamuarachchi - BSc Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering - Thesis Project - 2021/03 to 2022/05

Anju Chamantha - BSc Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering - Thesis Project - 2021/03 to 2022/05

Darshana Rathnayaka - BSc Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering - Thesis Project - 2019/01 to 2019/12

Dasun Pubudumal - BSc Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering - Thesis Project - 2019/01 to 2019/12

Ashen Kavinda De Silva - BSc Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering - Thesis Project - 2019/01 to 2019/12

Akhitha Manjitha - BSc Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering - Thesis Project - 2019/01 to 2019/12

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Maya Guido - BSc Computer Science - Semester Project - 2022/02 to 2022/05

SLIIT, Sri Lanka

Sapumal Wijekoon - BSc Computer Science - External Project - 2022/04 to Present

Selected Coverage

Alexis Goujon wins EDEE Thesis Award
November 2024 - EPFL News

Postdoctoral researcher Lakmal Meegahapola selected as "Cyber-Physical Systems Rising Star"
June 2024 - ETH News

Lakmal Meegahapola wins Sri Lankan presidential research prize
December 2023 - EPFL News, Moratuwa CSE News,

Apple Workshop on Machine Learning for Health 2023
November 2023 - Apple ML Research Blog

Using AI for social benefit – WeNet and community focused social media
November 2023 - LSE News

Two Young Researchers Garner Prestigious International Awards
October 2023 - EPFL News, IDIAP News

AI and an app to understand drinking habits among young adults
April 2021 - le nouvelliste, 20min.ch, planetesante, Idiap News, ictjournal.ch, netzwoche.ch, rhonefm.ch

Evaluating effects of COVID-19 lockdown on well-being - Civique mobile app
April 2020 - CIVIQUE, EPFL News, 24heures, lfm.ch, MirageNews

When Social Networks Become ‘Diversity-Aware’ Research Platforms
February 2020 - PYMNTS

WENET Behavioral Mobile Sensing App Mexico Prepilot
December 2019 - El Universal, Plano Informativo, El Portal, Televisa San Luis Potosi

Mr 360 | Lakmal Meegahapola
August 2020 - olivescript

University of Moratuwa EXMO: Budding geniuses
May 2017 - dailynews.lk

2016 Throwback: The Biggest Moments In Sri Lankan Tech
January 2017 - readme.lk

Asia teams impress at Imagine Cup 2016
August 2016 - Microsoft Asia News Center

Bit Masters & Sri Lanka win big at the Imagine Cup Finals
July 2016 - readme.lk, dailymirror.lk

Local university students showcase innovative excellence at local Imagine Cup finals
May 2016 - sundaytimes.lk, readme.lk

Announcing the 2016 Big Idea: Pitch Winners!
November 2015 - Student Developer Evangelism Team, Microsoft

AMPLUS - smart ad display software wins Jaffna-based YGC
November 2015 - sundaytimes.lk, ft.lk

Hobbies

I like to travel and have been to 45 countries so far. One of the things I like to do the most is hiking/trekking. Some milestones I am proud of include Everest Base Camp - Nepal (5364m), Mount Kinabalu - Malaysia (4095m), Volcano Semeru - Indonesia (3676m), Kawah Ijen - Indonesia (2799m), Augstenbern - Leichtenstein (2359m). My goal is to travel to 100 countries and to climb at least a few 6000m+ peaks. Here are some highlights from my adventures.

I have a YouTube channel where I post my travel videos. The equipment I use are the Sony A7III mirrorless camera, GoPro Hero 6, and last but not least, the DJI Mavic Air drone. Check out my videos below.

Last Updated: 29 July 2024