Amila
Silva
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, GenAI at Canva
ML PhD · Ex-Meta · Ex-Amazon
AI Researcher and Engineer with 8+ years of Industry and Research Experience, 15+ Top-tier Publications, and 450+ Citations with a PhD specialising in Multimodal Deep Learning. Amila's current focus is on Generative AI-based Design Generation — building AI systems that empower the world to design at Canva.
News
Promoted to Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Canva.
Our paper "Unsupervised domain-agnostic fake news detection using multi-modal weak signals" was published in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).
Our paper "LipAT: Beyond style transfer for controllable neural simulation of Lipstick using cosmetic attributes" was accepted to WACV 2024!
Our paper titled "CoLLAT: On Adding Fine-grained Audio Understanding to Language Models using Token-Level Locked-Language Tuning" was accepted to NeurIPS 2023!
Started as Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Canva.
Nominated as one of the top two Graduate Research Students of the Year at the Community Awards in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Melbourne! Video Portfolio
Started as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne!
Started as Research Intern (Artificial Intelligence) at FAIR, Meta AI in Menlo Park.
Submitted my thesis for examination, which is entitled "Enhancing Deep Multimodal Representation: Online, Noise-robust and Unsupervised Learning".
Completed the completion seminar of my PhD!
Started as Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon.
Our paper titled "Noise-robust Learning from Multiple Unsupervised Sources of Inferred Labels" was accepted to AAAI 2022.
Elected as one of the co-presidents of the Sri Lankan Graduates' Society (SLGS), The University of Melbourne for the year 2021/22.
Our paper titled "Propagation2Vec: Embedding partial propagation networks for explainable fake news early detection" was accepted to Information Processing & Management Journal 2021.
Our paper titled "Embracing Domain Differences in Fake News: Cross-domain Fake News Detection using Multi-modal Data" was accepted to AAAI 2021.
Our paper titled "Embedding Partial Propagation Network for Fake News Early Detection" was accepted to appear in Mining Actionable Insights from Social Networks (MAISoN 2020) - Special Edition on Dis/Misinformation Mining from Social Media (co-located with CIKM 2020).
A paper titled "METEOR: Learning Memory and Time Efficient Representations from Multi-modal Data Streams" was accepted to CIKM 2020.
A paper titled "On Predicting Personal Values of Social Media Users using Community-Specific Language Features and Personal Value Correlation" was accepted to ICWSM 2021.
A paper titled "OMBA-User-Guided Product Representations for Online Market Basket Analysis" was accepted to ECML-PKDD 2020.
Our submission for the Rich Context Competition 2019 was published as a book chapter in Rich Search and Discovery for Research Datasets.
A paper titled "JPLink: On Linking Jobs to Vocational Interest Types" was accepted to PAKDD 2020.
Our papers titled "USTAR: Online Multimodal Embedding for Modeling User-Guided Spatiotemporal Activity" and "Understanding Multilingual Communities through Analysis of Code-switching Behaviors in Social Media Discussions" were accepted to IEEE-BigData 2019.
I have been awarded the Rowden White Scholarship, which was established with a donation from Sir Alfred Edward Rowden White and is offered to students undertaking research studies with Melbourne Dental School, Melbourne Medical School, Melbourne School of Engineering, Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences or Faculty of Science.
A paper titled "On Learning Word Embeddings From Linguistically Augmented Text Corpora" was accepted to IWCS 2019.
I have been awarded the Melbourne Graduate Research Scholarship.
A paper titled "SemEval-2018 Task 8: Semantic Extraction from CybersecUrity REports using Natural Language Processing (SecureNLP)" was accepted to the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, SemEval 2018 (co-located with NAACL 2018).
I have been awarded Prof. OP Kulashethra Award and Prof. KKYW Perera Award for my excellent academic performance during my undergraduate studies.
Our undergraduate thesis project titled "Light Field System for Image Based Rendering of Ancient Artifacts" won the prestigious Manamperi Engineering Award 2017, awarded by Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science (SLAAS) for the best engineering final year undergraduate group project carried out in a Sri Lankan university in 2016.