I'm Dilruk Perera
I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore. I completed my PhD in 2020 at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore.
My research focuses on developing machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions to understand and model users in complex and highly dynamic environments such as healthcare and social networks to improve the quality of life.
In healthcare research, I’m focusing on modelling dynamic patient phenotypes and disease progression trajectories to develop effective and personalized treatment regimens for complex diseases such as sepsis and diabetes. My current work introduces novel Reinforcement Learning and Deep Learning algorithms to learn effective treatment policies, using imperfect clinical data.
I’m also focusing on developing cross-social network user preference learning and understanding models that can infer missing user preferences from some networks to create holistic user profiles for recommendation purposes.
Teaching: Advanced Statistical Learning
Published in top international conferences: 
Worked in: 
Co-founded: "RecceLabs (PVT) Ltd", AI Product and Services Company
Education
PhD in Computer Science – National University of Singapore
Media Management Research Lab, School of Computing
Dissertation: Towards Comprehensive User Preference Learning: Modelling User Preference Dynamics Across Social Networks for Recommendations.
Committee: Professor Roger Zimmermann (Advisor), Professor David Rosenblum, Associate Professor Min-Yen Kan, Professor Zhou Xiaofang (External Examiner).
Proposed novel cross social network recommendation solutions to learn multi-modal user preferences and their dynamics across heterogeneous domains to considerably improve recommendation performance.
Published in 4 A* AI conferences (AAAI, WWW, IJCAI, and ACM MM) and received the Dean’s Research Excellence Award.
Teaching assistant for 4 undergraduate modules in School of Computing for 6 semesters.
BSc (Hons) in Information Technology
Faculty of Information Technology – University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
First Class Honours with a GPA of 3.91 and on the Dean’s List Academic Excellence in all semesters.
Academic Experience
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore
Advisor: Assistant Professor Mengling 'Mornin' Feng
Lead 3 data science teams with undergraduate and doctoral students in Singapore, China, and Sri Lanka to propose novel AI solutions for pressing real world problems identified by clinicians from Singapore General Hospital and National University Hospital.
Projects:Personalizing blood vancomycin level prediction for vancomycin treatment.
Automating frailty identification.
Identifying patient phenotypes and predicting effects of steroids on septic patients.
Organized 2 international healthcare data science hackathons as a committee member. Led the data collection team and contacted worldwide research collaborators to successfully gain access to 20+ high-quality healthcare datasets for data hackings.
Co-lecturer for Advanced Statistical Learning (SPH6004) for the past 2 semesters covering topics in reinforcement learning.
Supervise PhD research projects in the lab to develop intelligent treatment agents that learn optimal personalized treatment regimens, using past imperfect clinician decisions made in complex medical environments.
Doctoral Researcher
School of Computing, National University of Singapore
Advisor: Professor Roger Zimmermann
Proposed the first of its kind generative adversarial learning approach to synthesize missing user preferences on social networks such as Twitter and YouTube.
Introduced a generic listwise optimization criterion to considerably improve the accuracy of recommendations using implicit feedback data.
Proposed generic extensions to the standard LSTM architecture to enable online recommendations.
Introduced novel matrix factorization and deep learning-based solutions to learn multi-modal user preferences and their dynamics across heterogeneous domains.
Research Scientist – Intern
Rakuten Inc. , Tokyo
Conducted a comprehensive literature survey and identified the limitations and research gaps in existing Multi-Task Learning based Click Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CVR) estimation algorithms.
Designed and implemented a novel multi-layered LSTM architecture with a new sequence learning algorithm to conduct both CTR and CVR estimations in an online environment.
PROFESSIONAL Experience
Consultant – AI Lead
HeHealth, Singapore
Oversees the AI pipeline of the company, supervise Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision projects that are specifically designed to solve male healthcare problems.
Responsibilities:
Conduct research, feasibility analyses and design solutions.
Lead internal and external AI development teams from project planning to deployment.
Co-founder/CTO
RecceLabs (Pvt) Ltd, Singapore and Sri Lanka
Responsibilities:
Create and execute our strategic business plan and communicate with new and existing customers to meet their needs.
Design and supervise the development of our main products, an intelligent demand side platform for real time bidding, and a cloud-based recommendation platform.
Senior Software Engineer
Virtusa (Pvt) Ltd,Sri Lanka, a CMMI Level 5 certified global software company
Developed connectors to integrate the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with public APIs and web services such as Google cloud services, Facebook, Github and Jira to enable end-to-end business scenarios.
Responsibilities:
Lead 3 teams of 4+ Senior/Software Engineers and oversaw the scrum activities.
Full stack software development using Java and JavaScript languages, and SOAP and REST web services technologies.
Communicate with Product Owner and client for requirement gathering, feasibility analyses, customizations and technical walk-throughs.
Conduct proof of concepts and implemented end-to-end IOT based business scenarios on the ESB.
Software Engineer
Virtusa (Pvt) Ltd, Sri Lanka
Revamp the Sri Lankan government web portal (gov.lk) and integrate all e-government services to a central web portal.
Responsibilities:
Full stack software development to reimplement the government web portal (gov.lk) using Java (Struts and Hibernate) web (JavaScript, HTML and CSS) and database (MySQL) technologies.
Implement a new central payment gateway for nationwide e-government services.
Implement new e-services for various government bodies such as ministry of education, department of motor traffic and department of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources.
Software Engineer – Intern
Virtusa (Pvt) Ltd, Sri Lanka
Improved the company wide large-scale Java based automated code quality review software.
Responsibilities:
Full stack software development using Java, JavaScript and MySQL technologies.
Conduct initial research and extend the code review software to newly support Python and Pega programming language code reviews.
Publications
Dilruk Perera, Liu Siqi and Mengling Feng., 2023. Demystifying complex treatment recommendations: A hierarchical cooperative multi-agent RL approach. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks.
Dilruk Perera, Liu Siqi and Mengling Feng. Smart Imitator: Learning from imperfect clinical decisions. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2022 (under submission).
Perera, D and Zimmermann, R., 2020, April. Towards comprehensive recommender systems: Time-aware unified recommendations based on listwise ranking of implicit cross-network data. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 34, No. 01, pp. 189-197).
Perera, D and Zimmermann, R., 2019, May. CnGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for cross-network user preference generation for non-overlapped users. In Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference (pp. 3144-3150).
Perera, D and Zimmermann, R., 2018, July. LSTM networks for online cross-network recommendations. In Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 3825-3833).
Perera, D and Zimmermann, R., 2017, October. Exploring the use of time-dependent cross-network information for personalized recommendations. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (pp. 1780-1788).
AWARDS & SCHOLARSHIPS
Awards
Dean's Graduate Research Excellence Award for outstanding PhD research performance, National University of Singapore, Academic year: 2019/2020.
Dean’s List of Academic Excellence in all semesters, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, 2009 - 2013.
Scholarships
National University of Singapore Research Scholarship from 2015 to 2019.
Grant to travel and present my research at the International Young Scientists Forum Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China in 2019.
National University of Singapore conference travel grants for 4 consecutive years from 2017 to 2019.
Mahapola Higher Education Scholarship, Government of Sri Lanka from 2009 to 2013.
TEACHING AND MENTORING
Co-lecturer for Advanced Statistical Learning (SPH6004)
Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore
Prepared materials, conducted lectures and lab sessions covering reinforcement learning research methodologies, theory and applications for 10+ PhD students for the past 2 semesters.
Teaching Assistant for Data Structures and Algorithms (CS2040C)
School of Computing, National University of Singapore
Prepared and evaluated assignments of 200+ undergraduate students and conducted online invigilation for groups of 40 students.
Teaching Assistant for Software Engineering Project I and II (CS3201 and CS3202)
School of Computing, National University of Singapore
Conducted tutorials and consultations for 8 groups of 5 undergraduate students for 4 semesters.
Prepared, invigilated, and evaluated assignments of 280+ students.
Teaching Assistant for Programming Methodology (CS1010)
School of Computing, National University of Singapore
Prepared multiple Java coding assignments and test cases for evaluations.
Project Supervision
Co-supervise PhD research projects at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore and Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia to develop intelligent treatment agents that learn optimal personalized treatment regimens, using past imperfect clinician decisions made in complex medical environments.
Co-supervise two undergraduate students for Final Year Research Project (BT41011) at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore.
Huang Menglin (2021/2022 Semester 1) – Robust Deep Recommendation Systems under Adversarial Samples.
Qiu Shichao (2021/2022 Semester 2) – Real Time Bidding in Display Advertising.
Co-supervise a team of graduate teaching assistants from Sri Lanka Technological Campus on a blockchain research project in collaboration with postdoctoral researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Topic: Smart Blockchain technologies for next generation healthcare solutions.
RESEARCH GRANTS
2021
Collaborator of the Ministry of Education Tier 1 and National University Health System Seed Grant for $160,000 (under submission).
2020 – 2022
Collaborator of the National University Health System Seed Grant for “Automating the detection of frailty” for S$95,000.
ACADEMIC SERVICES
Invited Presentations
Presented a research paper at the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’ 20), New York, USA in February 2020. [slides]
Presented my research at the Computing Research Week, National University of Singapore in 2020. [talk] [slides]
Presented a research paper at the 28th Web Conference (WWW’19), San Francisco, USA in May 2019. [slides]
Presented my research at the International Young Scientist Forum Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China in March 2019. [slides]
Presented a research paper at the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI '18), Stockholm, Sweden in July 2018. [slides]
Presented a research paper at the 25th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM’17), Mountain View, USA in October 2017. [slides]
Organizing Committee Member
Organizing committee member of the annual Singapore Healthcare AI Datathon, National University of Singapore, National University Health System and MIT Critical Data. Led the data collection team and contacted worldwide research collaborators to successfully gain access to 20+ high-quality healthcare datasets for the Datathon.
Coordinator of the Thematic Workshop, 25th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM’ 17). Collected, corrected and compiled 60+ presentations for the oral presentation session, and provided technical support on the day.
Main coordinator of the nationwide school level Young Innovators Competition, National Exhibition of Information Technology, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Was involved with broadcasting the competition and selecting exhibits.
Invited Program Committee Member
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), since 2020
International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), since 2020
Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), since 2020
IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), since 2019
IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Big Data (IEEE BigMM), since 2019
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology Journal (ACM TIST), since 2019
ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), since 2017
International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST), since 2017
EXTERNAL PROJECTS
Propose new listwise learning-to-rank recommendation approaches using adversarial and corporative learning techniques, in collaboration with postdoctoral researchers and AI engineers in Singapore.
Co-founded and contributed to fit2school,a community blog that shares Computer Science and Information Technology knowledge primarily with Sri Lankan Advanced Level students using native Sinhalese and Tamil languages.
Designed and implemented admin and authentication modules for the National University of Singapore Collab Application, which helps undergraduate students to effectively collaborate under the supervision of lecturers using React, AngularJS and MongoDB technologies.
Contact Me
Dilruk Perera
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
National University of Singapore
EMAIL: dilruk@nus.edu.sg
GET IN TOUCH
Dilruk Perera
POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW
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