R. Edirisinghe

Background

Experience & methods

Teaching, industry practice, education, and the methods that support the research programme.

01

Teaching

Academic experience

01

Teaching Assistant & Co-Lecturer — Data Visualization for Machine Learning

School of Computer Science & IT, University College Cork

2025/26 Academic Year · CS3205 / CS6426 · Cork, Ireland

Co-taught the undergraduate and postgraduate Data Visualization for Machine Learning module. Responsibilities included revision of lecture and laboratory material, lecture delivery, practical laboratory teaching, preparation of teaching materials, and assessment.

Responsibilities & details
  • Revised lecture content and laboratory material for the 2025/26 cohort.
  • Delivered lectures on data preparation, machine-learning visualisation workflows, and interpretation.
  • Designed and taught practical Python laboratory sessions.
  • Prepared lecture slides and supporting teaching material for the 2026 delivery.
  • Completed assessment and marking of student assignments and examinations.
  • Data Visualisation
  • Machine Learning
  • Python
  • Assessment
02

Visiting Lecturer

Department of Electrical & Information Engineering, University of Ruhuna

Aug 2023 – Sep 2024 · Galle, Sri Lanka · Hybrid

Courses taught: Introduction to Data Visualization with Power BI; Excel for Data Science; Data Preprocessing & Cleaning; and Data Splitting & Cross Validation.

Responsibilities & details
  • Introduction to Data Visualization with Power BI — data sources, visualisations, colour theory, Gestalt principles, DAX expressions, and dashboards.
  • Excel for Data Science — data cleaning, PivotTables, time-series analysis, statistical analysis, and Solver.
  • Data Preprocessing & Cleaning — missing data, outlier detection, one-hot encoding, and categorical variables.
  • Data Splitting & Cross Validation — training, validation, and test sets; overfitting; precision, recall, F1, and confusion matrices.
  • Data Science Teaching
  • Power BI
  • Excel Analytics
03

Visiting Lecturer

Sri Lanka Telecom Training Centre · Sri Lanka Telecom PLC

Aug 2023 – Sep 2024 · Welisara, Sri Lanka · On-site

Taught Pearson BTEC courses and configured laboratory environments, coursework, and assessment material aligned with Pearson BTEC standards.

Responsibilities & details
  • Fundamentals of AI & Intelligent Systems (K/618/5660) — AI types, applications, NLP, conversational AI, and ethics.
  • Big Data & Visualization (J/618/6251) — Python for big data, Jupyter, Power BI, DAX, and data governance.
  • Business Intelligence (M/615/1641) — BI systems, data warehouses, OLAP, and descriptive and predictive analytics.
  • AI Education
  • Big Data
  • Business Intelligence
02

Professional practice

Industry experience

01

Data Analyst

EFL Global

May 2023 – Sep 2024 · Colombo, Sri Lanka · Hybrid

Responsibilities & details
  • Automated global finance reporting across 39 countries & 70+ offices using Python, VBA & Advanced Excel.
  • Maintained Azure Databricks workloads supporting automated MIS, AR & AP reporting.
  • Built Power BI & Tableau dashboards for real-time insights and decision-making.
  • Implemented business workflow automation using Microsoft Power Automate & Logic Apps.
  • Managed Azure Analysis Services, Data Lakes, Blob Storage, and Synapse Analytics.
  • Python
  • Azure Databricks
  • Power BI
  • Tableau
  • Power Automate
02

Implementation Engineer

Affno Asia Pacific

Nov 2022 – May 2023 · Colombo, Sri Lanka

Responsibilities & details
  • Designed and deployed BI solutions for supply chain analytics.
  • Developed Python & VBA-based data-wrangling automation for large datasets.
  • Worked as Technical Business Analyst in support of client operations.
  • Worked with Amazon EC2 & MongoDB Atlas for cloud-based solutions.
  • Data Wrangling
  • Business Intelligence
  • Supply Chain Analytics
  • MongoDB
03

Operations Analyst

SYNERGEN Health

Sep 2019 – Nov 2022 · Colombo, Sri Lanka

Responsibilities & details
  • Managed the Qlik Sense cloud-based RCM BI platform (Doctrix) for real-time KPI & SLA monitoring.
  • Led process training for multiple clients in Revenue Cycle Management (RCM).
  • Implemented Python & VBA automation for financial reporting and data integrity.
  • Maintained Amazon DynamoDB & Kinesis Data Streams for real-time analytics.
  • Healthcare BI
  • QlikSense
  • Revenue Cycle Analytics
  • Python
  • VBA
04

Associate Operations Analyst (Intern)

SYNERGEN Health

Mar 2019 – Sep 2019 · Colombo, Sri Lanka

Responsibilities & details
  • Assisted data management processes and trade support.
  • Conducted client reporting, process monitoring, and data sanity checks.
05

Business Analyst (Intern)

Global System Solutions

Sep 2018 – Mar 2019 · Colombo, Sri Lanka

Responsibilities & details
  • Gathered requirements through interviews, workshops, and site visits.
  • Developed use cases, workflows, and requirement documentation.
  • Supported pre-sales activities for business intelligence solutions.
03

Formal study

Education

01

PhD in Computer Science

University College Cork, Ireland

Sep 2024 – Sep 2027 (expected) · CASCADE Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network

Research focus: Modelling Intertextual Relations under Transformation: Retrieval, Judgement, and Visual Analytics across the Parallel Text Spectrum

Responsibilities & details
  • Representing textual relations across paraphrase, adaptation, obfuscation, allusion, historical variation, and related forms of transformation.
  • Developing large-scale retrieval methods for passages with limited lexical overlap.
  • Constructing benchmarks and evaluating relation judgements across different forms and degrees of transformation.
  • Designing visual-analytics methods for exploring relation spaces and supporting close reading.
02

M.Sc. Business Analytics

Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK

Sep 2021 – Sep 2023 · Distinction

Thesis: Twitter Sentiment Reason Mining Framework to Identify Major Problems in US Healthcare Industry · Grade: A

Responsibilities & details
  • Developed a Python-based NLP framework using sentiment analysis, topic modelling, clustering, and text vectorisation to analyse Twitter discourse on the US healthcare sector.
03

B.Sc. (Hons) Business Information Systems

Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff, UK

Nov 2016 – Oct 2018

Thesis: Computer-Aided Diagnosis System for Lung Cancer Detection — a Java-based CADe system using image processing and machine learning.

04

BTEC Higher National Diploma in Software Development

Pearson Edexcel, UK

May 2014 – May 2016

Coursework included object-oriented programming, data structures and algorithms, IT security, networking technologies, web application development, and database development.

04

Working vocabulary

Methods & technical skills

Research Methods

  • Information Retrieval
  • Semantic Retrieval
  • Corpus Engineering
  • Benchmark Design
  • Relation Judgement
  • LLM Evaluation
  • Textual Similarity
  • Visual Analytics
  • Experimental Evaluation

NLP & Retrieval

  • Hugging Face Transformers
  • SentenceTransformers / SBERT
  • spaCy
  • Gensim
  • NLTK
  • BM25
  • ANN Search
  • LLM APIs
  • Local Language Models
  • Rule-Based Parsing

Data & Research Engineering

  • Python
  • SQL
  • Pandas
  • DuckDB
  • PyArrow
  • JSONL
  • Parquet
  • PyTorch
  • scikit-learn
  • CUDA
  • Git
  • Jupyter

Visualisation & Analytics

  • Plotly
  • Matplotlib
  • Streamlit
  • Power BI
  • Tableau
  • Qlik Sense
  • DAX

Cloud & Systems

  • Azure Databricks
  • Azure Synapse
  • Azure Blob Storage
  • Azure Logic Apps
  • Power Automate
  • AWS EC2
  • AWS DynamoDB
  • AWS Kinesis
  • MongoDB Atlas