I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. Catherine Jutzeler. I got my PhD in EECS from EPFL in February 2024, advised by Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez. Previously, I was a Research Intern at Google Research (Mountain View, CA, USA) working with Dr. Venky Ramachandran, Dr. Kai Kohlhoff, and Dr. Vidhya Navalpakkam, Nokia Bell Labs (Cambridge, UK) working with Prof. Daniele Quercia and Dr. Michael Eggleston, and was 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.
My research is highly interdisciplinary, and I work with multimodal time series data from mobile/wearable/physiological sensors (IMU, location, PPG, app logs, etc.) and/or electronic health record data, focusing on aspects such as personalization and robustness of machine learning and deep learning models, with applications toward human behavior modeling, context recognition, and healthcare. I also have extensive experience in conducting both in-lab and in-the-wild user studies, aiming for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. In my work, I often collaborate with other experts such as clinicians, UX researchers, interaction designers, social and behavioral scientists, and ethicists.
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 ๐ named one of the top four for Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award at ACM Ubicomp 2023, ๐ recognized as a Rising Star in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in 2024, and ๐ selected as a Young Researcher at 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2024. Our work has ๐ won a Distinguished Paper Award at ACM IMWUT 2023, ๐ the Special Recognition for Sustainable Practices at ACM CHI 2024, ๐ 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.
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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 ๐บ๐ธ and Nokia Bell Labs ๐ฌ๐ง. |
2024 July | Gave a talk at the Computer Science Department of the University of Melbourne ๐ฆ๐บ. |
2024 April | Joined ACM CHI 2025 as an Associate Chair. |
2024 April | ๐ต 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 | ๐ 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 ๐จ๐ญ. |
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 | ๐ 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 | ๐ 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 ๐จ๐ญ. |
2024 January | ๐ 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 | ๐ 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 | ๐ Recieved a "Special Recognition for Outstanding Reviews" for four of my reviews at the ACM CHI 2024 conference. |
2023 October | ๐ 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 | ๐ 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 โ๐ฎ ๐๐๐๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ป๐ ๐๐ต๐ผ ๐ถ๐ ๐บ๐ฎ๐ธ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ผ๐๐๐๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฐ๐ต ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฏ๐๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐ ๐๐ผ, ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ถ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐น๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ฝ ๐ถ๐ป, ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ถ๐ฒ๐น๐ฑ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ฏ๐ถ๐พ๐๐ถ๐๐ผ๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐บ๐ฝ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ดโ, 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 | ๐ 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 ๐จ๐ญ. |
2024 May | Gave a talk at the University of Oxford (Virtually) ๐ฌ๐ง. |
2024 May | Gave a talk at the Swiss Data Science Center ๐จ๐ญ. |
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 | ๐ 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 ๐" 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 ๐" is from the WeNet โ 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 | ๐ 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 | ๐ 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 โ The Internet of Us" project, with wonderful colleagues from the University of Tuebingen, University of Trento, Aalborg University, EPFL (รcole polytechnique fรฉdรฉrale 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 | ๐ 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'Investigaciรณ en Intelยทligรจncia 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. |
Thesis: Generalization and Personalization of Machine Learning for Multimodal Mobile Sensing in Everyday Life
Advised by: Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez
Major: Computer Science and Engineering
Thesis: Change Detection and Notification of Web Pages
Advised by: Prof. Dulani Meedeniya, Prof. Sampath Jayarathna
Major: Management Accounting
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