Eng. Shiromal Fernando
Managing Director,
Civil and Structural Engineering Consultants (Pvt.) Ltd.
Future Trends in Tall buildings; Design and Construction Technology
Eng. Shiromal Fernando is one of the leading structural engineers in Sri Lanka and has been involved in many high-rise buildings in the country, including the tallest structures. He is a distinguished and active member of many institutions and societies of Sri Lanka such as the Institution of Engineers, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Society of Structural Engineers, Technical Advisory Committee of Disaster Management Center, and also served as the Honorary Secretary of the Society of Structural Engineers during 2005-2008. In 2010 he became the Vice President of the Green Building Council Sri Lanka. He is a working committee member of the Sri Lankan Standards Institute where he contributes to developing Cement and Steel standards for Sri Lanka since 2009. He is also a proud Member of the American Society of Structural Engineers (ASCE). He leads the Structural Engineering Company, Civil and Structural Engineering Consultants Private Ltd. which is based in Colombo.
CSEC is a state-of-the-art consultancy firm comprising some of the prominent Structural Engineers in the industry and academia. Projects of CSEC include the Colombo Lotus Tower, Grand Hyatt, Cinnamon Life Project, AVIC Astoria Residential Project, Prime Grand, Trizen High-Rise Residential Complex, Colombo City Centre, Capitol Twin Peak, Pearl Grand, KSA, Star City Burma, Altair, Macksons Residencies, Southern Highway toll buildings and toll plazas, Katunayake.
Dr. Ruvan Weerasinghe
Former Director of the University of Colombo School of Computing
AI from Advanced Technology to a foundational component of the knowledge stack
Dr. Ruvan Weerasinghe is a former Director of the University of Colombo School of Computing, and also served as a Visiting Professor at the Management & Science University of Malaysia, and Visiting Faculty at the Umea University of Sweden. He was also an ERCIM Fellow at France’s INRIA Labs and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Carnegie-Mellon University’s Language Technology Institute in Pittsburgh, USA.
He has served on various committees and boards at the University Grants Commission, Ministries of Education and Higher Education, the National Science Foundation, the Information & Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka, the Lanka Education And Research Network, the Lanka Software Foundation, the Lanka Domain Registry, the Sectoral Committee on ICT of the Sri Lanka Standards Institute, the ICT Advisory Committee of the Export Development Board and Sri Lanka CERT.
His research interests are Computational Linguistics including Machine Translation, and particularly in techniques employing data-driven methods on large datasets. His research interests expand naturally to Artificial Intelligence and to Bioinformatics.
He currently works as the Dean/Academic at the School of Computing of the Informatics Institute of Technology, Sri Lanka.