Thejan Rajapakshe
Lead Data Analytics Consultant
Experienced Software Engineer with a PhD in Deep Learning, passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI. Specializing in Large Language Models, Reinforcement Learning, and Quantum Machine Learning.
Research Interests
Pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence through interdisciplinary research
Large Language Models
Researching and developing cutting-edge LLM applications, including Speech Emotion Recognition and Natural Language Understanding systems.
Reinforcement Learning
Published research on Deep RL for Speech Emotion Recognition, including novel pre-training strategies and domain adaptation techniques.
Quantum Machine Learning
Exploring parameterised quantum circuits for representation learning, with published work in Scientific Reports on QML for affective computing.
Neural Architecture Search
Developed emoDARTS - a DARTS-optimised joint CNN and Sequential Neural Network architecture achieving superior performance in emotion recognition.
Experience
10+ years of building software solutions and leading technical teams
Lead Data Analytics Consultant
Auto & General Australia
Aug 2024 - Present
Brisbane, Queensland
Leading data analytics initiatives in the insurance sector, driving insights and strategy through advanced analytics.
External Lecturer
University of Southern Queensland
May 2024 - Aug 2024
Queensland, Australia
Teaching and mentoring students in computer science and data science disciplines.
Consultant
Cognizant Servian
Jul 2022 - Jul 2024
Brisbane, Queensland
Cloud Data Engineer working on projects for Senex Energy and Shell Energy. Designed and developed cloud-based serverless data ingestion pipeline applications.
Full Stack Engineer
germain APM
Feb 2022 - Jun 2022
Remote
Full stack development for application performance monitoring solutions.
Associate Technical Team Lead
CodeGen International
Feb 2016 - Feb 2022
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Led Research & Development initiatives including the Lia intelligent chatbot platform and FLAiR Suite - AI-powered tools for travel industry.
Publications
Research contributions in Deep Learning, Speech Recognition, and Quantum ML
Featured Projects
A selection of impactful projects from AI platforms to cloud data engineering
AI-powered chatbot platform with Natural Language Understanding, context awareness, and peer-to-peer chat capabilities. Features both bot and human agent interactions.
2019 - 2022
FLAiR Suite
AI-powered toolkit for travel industry supporting intelligent customer journey optimization and conversion rate improvements. Built as SaaS with multi-tenancy.
2019 - 2022
Sense Crawler
Distributed automated crawling platform with parallel client execution on Hadoop cluster. Master node manages task distribution for scalable data collection.
2018 - 2021
Inspire - Personalization Engine
2-in-1 user profiling and recommender engine using collaborative filtering, SVDs, and deep learning for personalized recommendations.
2017 - 2019
Senex Energy Data Platform
Led cloud data engineering initiatives, designing and implementing serverless data pipelines on Google Cloud Platform.
2023 - 2024
Shell Energy Data Pipeline
Cloud-based serverless data ingestion pipeline applications for energy sector analytics and reporting.
2022 - 2023
Skills & Education
Technical expertise built over 14+ years of software engineering and research
Technical Skills
AI & Machine Learning
Programming & Frameworks
Cloud & Infrastructure
Data Engineering
Education
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Computer Science - Deep Learning
University of Southern Queensland
Queensland, Australia
Bachelor of Applied Sciences
Mathematics and Computer Science
Rajarata University of Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka
Bachelor of Information Technology
Information Technology
University of Colombo, School of Computing
Sri Lanka
Certifications
Build Basic Generative Adversarial Networks - DeepLearning.AI
Deep Reinforcement Learning 2.0 - Udemy
Neural Networks and Deep Learning - Coursera
Improving Deep Neural Networks - Coursera