Yasas Senarath

Researcher · AI for Social Good · PhD Candidate

George Mason University

Biography

Yasas Senarath is a research assistant at the George Mason University, Fairfax. His research interests lie in the area of Social Computing and Natural Language Understanding. In his current research, he is aiming to provide solutions to problems in natural and societal crises by analyzing social media content.

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Research Interests

Continual Learning
  • • Learning from evolving data streams
  • • Mitigating catastrophic forgetting
  • • Replay-based learning methods
Knowledge-Infused Machine Learning
  • • External knowledge integration
  • • Semantic feature representations
  • • Domain knowledge for NLP
Social Computing
  • • Social media mining
  • • Crowdsourced data analytics
  • • Behavioral pattern analysis
Crisis Informatics
  • • Emergency incident detection
  • • Disaster response systems
  • • Public health informatics

Education

Ph.D. in Information Technology 2026 (Expected)

George Mason University, United States

Knowledge-Infused Continual Learning, Advised by Dr. Hemant Purohit

M.Sc. (Applied Information Technology) 2022

George Mason University, United States

Cyber-Human Systems (CBHS), Advised by Dr. Hemant Purohit

M.Sc. in Computer Science (Data Science) 2019

University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Affect level opinion mining of Twitter streams, Advised by Dr. Uthayasanker Thayasivam

B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering 2018

University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis, Advised by Dr. Surangika Ranathunga

Timeline

  1. Master of Science

    University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

    Successfully completed Research based Masters in Computer Science, Concentration in Data Science.

  2. Teaching Assistant

    University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

    Started working as a Teaching Assistant at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa.

    Subjects: Data Science, Advanced Algorithms, Data Structures

  3. Bachelor Degree

    University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

    Successfully completed bachelor degree programme at Computer Science and Engineering Department at University of Moratuwa.

    CGPA: 3.95

  4. Internship

    CodeGen International (Pvt) Ltd

    Successfully completed internship at CodeGen. Performed research on Sentiment Analysis of Points of Interest Reviews on Yelp and Tripadvisor platforms.

  5. Started Engineering Degree Programme

    University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

    Started my Engineering Degree Programme at Engineering Faculty of University of Moratuwa.

  6. GCE A/L

    Bandaranayake College, Gampaha, Sri Lanka

    Passed with Merit - Physical Sciences Stream

    Combined Maths/Physics/Chemistry: A/A/A
    Island Rank: 107

  7. GCE O/L

    Bandaranayake College, Gampaha, Sri Lanka

    Passed with 8 A's and B grade.