Building future research collaborations between Melbourne and Jaffna

Researchers from the University of Melbourne and the University of Jaffna received a US$24,000 grant from Google to encourage research collaborations and promote research career pathways to computer science undergraduates in Jaffna.

University of Jaffna computer science students have learned technical skills, explored research career pathways and accessed mentorship opportunities through events organised together with the University of Melbourne.

“Being part of an initiative like this, you get to contribute to the community and see the positive impact that you can have on undergraduate students,” says Dr Rashindrie Perera.

University of Melbourne and University of Jaffna researchers designed the event series to share both the latest computer science research and research career advice with Sri Lankan undergraduate students. The team received a US$24,000 grant to support the series through Google’s exploreCSR program.

“We were really happy that Google also saw the value in our project,” says Dr Tamasha Malepathirana.

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Melbourne and Jaffna researchers work to give students more opportunities

Dr Perera and Dr Malepathirana, who were graduate researchers at the University of Melbourne at the time, visited the university before the event series.

“Not many speakers visit this university in person, especially due to its geographical distance from the capital city,” says Dr Perera.

“Jaffna was particularly affected by the Sri Lankan civil war. The students are not far behind in terms of academic knowledge. But some of the resources and facilities are not as up to date as in other areas.”

The University of Jaffna computer science students were very enthusiastic about University of Melbourne research.

“They asked a lot of questions, showed a good understanding of the topics that we were talking about and were very keen to learn more as well,” says Dr Malepathirana.

“That motivated us to support their research, opportunities and education, and inspired us to apply for this award as well.”

Dr. Perera and Dr. Malepathirana worked with Professor Saman Halgamuge from the University of Melbourne and Professor Amirthalingam Ramanan from the University of Jaffna to coordinate the events.

“This was our first grant that we applied for together. Professor Halgamuge helped us from the start of the application process to the end of the program,” says Dr Perera.

“And major credit goes to Professor Ramanan. We were amazed by his commitment and his dedication to this program,” says Dr Malepathirana.

Professor Ramanan says the Google exploreCSR Award has advanced computing research in Sri Lanka.

“The grant facilitated six research sessions, a three-day summer school on machine intelligence, a research symposium and mentoring sessions, benefiting not only University of Jaffna students but also those from other state universities,” Professor Ramanan says.

“A major highlight was a one-week educational tour to the University of Melbourne by a student and a Professor Ramanan from the University of Jaffna, where they participated in research discussions, presentations, and explored cutting-edge laboratories. Additionally, a high-performance computer is being procured to sustain future research at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Jaffna.”

By strengthening ties between their research communities, Dr Perera and Dr Malepathirana hope the program will foster further research collaborations between the two universities.

Research career opportunities begin with a PhD

Dr Perera and Dr Malepathirana returned to the University of Jaffna as part of the event series to talk to students about their research in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“The core of my work addresses all the challenges in applying machine learning in situations where it is difficult to collect large data sets,” says Dr Perera.

“This problem is especially relevant for fields like healthcare, where data collection can be costly, time consuming or even be restricted by concerns like privacy.”

Dr Perera’s PhD research could allow machine learning to be applied in smaller patient cohorts, smaller hospitals or rare diseases.

“My research focused on developing machine learning algorithms that can keep learning and improve over time,” says Dr Malepathirana.

Data for training machine learning or AI models often changes over time – and retraining a model with up-to-date data is costly and time consuming.

“I worked on making these machine learning models or neural networks smarter so that they can recognise these trends and adapt to those changes without having to be completely retrained,” Dr Malepathirana says.

Both Dr Perera and Dr Malepathirana finished their PhDs in 2024. Dr Perera works at Oracle as a Senior Applied Scientist. Dr Malepathirana is a senior machine learning engineer at Propel Health AI.

“You need to be able to work independently and approach problems systematically,” says Dr Perera.

“The PhD did provide me the foundation both technically and professionally to get to where I am today in my career.”

Learn more about a PhD in Engineering and IT