Meet Sri Lankan Researcher —Madhura Jayaratne

What are you currently working on or worked on before?

I’ve worked on Natural Language Processing (NLP), more specifically, semantic analysis, for my Bachelor thesis and Master’s thesis. My Ph.D. research was on developing scalable bio-inspired algorithms for multimodal perception. However, I am back to NLP.

What encouraged you to pursue your research topic?

For my Ph.D. research, I worked on artificial multimodal perception with applications in diverse areas. Most of the bio-inspired algorithms in this research area attempt to models the mechanisms of the brain rather than having an application focus. This was a major reason we resort to developing scalable algorithms for distributed computing environments to be able to apply on large multimodal datasets.

You can find my publications here.

What is the name of your current institute?

I’m currently with the Centre for Data Analytics and Cognition, La Trobe University.

Where do you find your best inspiration for your work?

I am inspired by the people with who I work/interact, their diverse backgrounds, and their stories.

What’s one of your biggest personal achievements so far?

When you do research, especially a Ph.D., you focus on specializing in a narrow area (depth). While doing that, I’ve always strived to achieve knowledge and experience in a broad and diverse set of areas and environments (breadth).

I feel lucky to have opportunities to achieve both to a good extend; depth with my research and breadth by working in a diverse set of areas and environments (ranging from corporates, startups, not for profits, etc).

What lessons would you share with a budding researcher?

Don’t be disheartened by setbacks and failures. From finding a research topic/supervisor to achieving a good research outcome, you’ll have a lot of failures/setbacks/rejections. Perseverance is the key.

What motivated you to be a researcher?

The opportunity to be at the forefront of new developments in your field. You get to read about the latest research, develop new technologies, develop new solutions by applying existing technologies, collaborate with others to do the same.

According to your opinion, what are the changes that the Sri Lankan education system needs to do, in order to meet the requirement of the international industry and academia?

More opportunities for pursuing STEM degrees at the university level. Also, encouraging students to take up STEM subjects at the school level by educating them about the opportunities. These efforts should also look at closing the gender gap in the take up of STEM subjects.

Given the opportunity I would support developing Research based careers in Sri Lanka.