Professional Biography

A journey of research excellence, academic leadership, and technological innovation.

Dr. Uthayasanker Thayasivam is a distinguished academic and researcher in the field of Computer Science & Engineering. He currently serves as the Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. His academic journey began with a Bachelor's degree in Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, followed by a doctoral degree in semantic computing from the University of Georgia, USA. With extensive industrial experience at leading technology companies including Google, Microsoft, Ask.com, and Glassdoor, Dr. Thayasivam brings a unique blend of academic excellence and practical industry knowledge to his research and teaching.

Work Experience

Head of Department

Department of Computer Science, University of Moratuwa

Jul 2023 - Present
  • Leading the largest and most sought-after engineering department in the country.
  • Managing 20 academic staff, 5 admin staff, 20 technicians, 20 instructors, and 1000 students.
  • Successfully executed the IESL accreditation process.
  • Improved delivery process with the latest technologies and increased student-centric learning.
  • Led the development of multiple laboratories by enhancing working conditions and expanding seating capacity.
  • Led collaboration with global industry leaders such as NVIDIA.
  • Leading the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the department.

Senior Lecturer

Department of Computer Science, University of Moratuwa

2017 - Present
  • Teaching Undergraduate: Data Structures & Algorithms, Machine Learning, Data Mining & IR, Distributed Systems.
  • Teaching Postgraduate: Machine Learning, Statistical Inference, Advanced Database Systems, Big Data Analytics, Data Science.
  • Founding member of the National Language Center (NLP Center).
  • Founding member & Director of Data SEARCH research center.
  • CO-PI: 4 SRC grants, 1 DOL Grant, 2 Ahead Grants. PI: 1 LT SRC Grant & 2 ST SRC Grants.
  • Won E-Swabhimani award for machine translation application 'SiTa'.
  • Negotiated AWS partnership for UOM and introduced HackerRank for teaching.

Manager, Search Engineering

Glassdoor Inc.

2016 - 2017
  • Led a team of 7 engineers & data scientists responsible for job search & recommendation.
  • Developed machine learning algorithms using large-scale data for business insights.
  • Created machine learning models to correct misspelled query searches.

Manager, Search & Platform

Ask.com (IAC Publication Labs)

2013 - 2016
  • Led a team of 5 engineers & data scientists for content Search and Recommendation across several sites (ask.com, about.com, investopedia.com, etc.).
  • Pioneered Search As A Service platform.
  • Improved coverage using Query modeling, spell correction, and noun phrase detection.
  • Leveraged Aggregated Ranking methods to improve search application relevancy.
  • Identified opportunities for product growth and cost savings.

Software Engineering Intern

Cloud Platform, Google, Atlanta, GA, USA

May - Aug 2011
  • Improved user navigation experience by implementing a search service.
  • Refined the performance of the search service by implementing an efficient indexing method.

Software Research Intern

Accenture Tech Labs, San Jose, California, USA

May - Aug 2010
  • Developed Process Model Requirements Gap Analyzer (ProcGap).
  • Improved inferencing and matching capabilities by developing a universal ontology (CR Ontology).
  • Published algorithms and presented at AAAI/IAAI 2011 conference.

Software Engineer, Research & Development

FAST - A Microsoft subsidiary, Norway

Jan - Jun 2008
  • Developed and tested the JUNO OSGI platform for Enterprise Search.
  • Developed a JDBC driver and JDBC ODBC Bridge for FAST Index.

Software Engineer

Learna

Mar 2007 - Jan 2008
  • Led a team to develop the eLearning software backend.
  • Developed security systems and centralized update systems.

Software Engineer

Millennium IT

Nov 2006 - Feb 2007
  • Developed an efficient billing solution for mobile monthly printing.

Research Experience

Scalable and Efficient Data Analysis

Improved Convergence of Iterative Ontology Alignment

Proposed a generic algorithm based on BCD technique. Published at AAAI 2012.

Parallel Alignment of Very Large Ontologies using MapReduce

Developed a MapReduce algorithm for scaling ontology alignment in Hadoop clusters.

A Distributed Mashup Framework

Developed a distributed framework to process mashups in a cluster.

Semantic Computing & NLP

Ontology Matching (Optima)

Led R&D of Optima, placed second in OAEI 2012. Techniques published at ISWC.

Utilizing WordNet for Ontology Alignment

Analyzed tradeoffs of using WordNet. Published in ICSC 2011.

Capability Requirement Matching (ProcGap)

Developed VOP matcher and CR Ontology. Published at AAAI 2011.

Multi-task Extension for Speech Representation

Proposed multi-task WavLM for keyword spotting, speaker ID, and emotion recognition. Submitted to ICASSP 2025.

AI for Transportation

Bus Arrival Time Prediction

Proposed multi-model ensemble approach. Published at ITSC 2023. Released GPS2GTFS library.

Mining & Matching

Y-School

Tool to mine student performance data and generate recommendations.

Taxon

Semi-automatic taxonomy learner from the web.

Drift Detection

Concept Drift Detection

Created Python library for drift detectors. Developing class-wise streaming method.

Academic & Administrative Roles

Academic Advisor

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Student Chapter, UoM

2023 - Present

Academic Advisor

IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Student Chapter, UoM

2023 - Present

Director, Data Science & AI Research & MSc

University of Moratuwa

Jan 2023 - Present

Founding Member

NLP Center, Dept of CSE, UoM

2021 - Present

Coordinator of MSc in Computer Science

Dept of CSE, UoM

Oct 2022 - July 2023

Director of Open-source Platform

AAIVU

2018 - Present

University Academic Ambassador

NVIDIA

AWS Educate Academic Ambassador

Amazon Web Services

Professional Memberships

  • Senior Member of IEEE (SMIEEE)
  • Member of Computer Society of Sri Lanka (MCSSL)
  • Member of Engineering Council Sri Lanka
  • Member of Institution of Engineers Sri Lanka (IESL)
  • Member of IEEE Young Professionals
  • Senior Member of IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society
  • Senior Member of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society

Past Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant

CSCI 4330/6330: AI and the Web

University of Georgia

Spring 2012

Guest Lecturer

CSCI 8370: Advanced Database Systems

University of Georgia

Spring 2009

Instructor

EN101: Electronic Engineering

University of Moratuwa

2005-2006