Laknath Ashwin De Silva
PhD Student at Johns Hopkins University
Clark Hall 317
Baltimore MD 21218
ldesilv2 at jhu dot edu
Hello there! My name is Laknath Ashwin De Silva (ලක්නාත් අශ්වින් ද සිල්වා in Sinhalese script). I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Dr. Joshua Vogelstein, Dr. Pratik Chaudhari (UPenn) and Dr. Carey E. Priebe.
I broadly work on {machine, deep} learning, with an aspiration of bridging the gap between artificial and natural intelligences. My doctoral research is currently focused on learning under non-stationary distributions and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization with applications in large language models, computer vision, and biomedical data science.
I received my Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka in 2020 ( ranked 1st among ~950 undergrads in the Faculty of Engineering). I completed my thesis on “Designing a Cost-Effective Dry Contact sEMG Sensor System for Controlling a Bionic Hand” with Dr. Simon Kappel and Dr. Thilina Lalitharatne. As an undergrad, I interned at The Florey Institute (University of Melbourne) and Center for Advanced Imaging (University of Queensland), where I worked with Dr. Steve Petrou, Dr. Saman Halgamuge, and Dr. Steffen Bollmann.
Outside work, I love spending time with my wife Malsha, playing the piano, hiking, and trying out new recipes. I am also an avid fan of history, astronomy, movies, and sports in general!
news
Sep 26, 2024 | Presented a poster on prospective learning at the 2024 Mathematical and Scientific Foundations of Deep Learning (MoDL) Annual Meeting held at the Simons Foundation, NYC |
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Sep 25, 2024 | “Prospective Learning: Learning for a Dynamic Future” was accepted to NeurIPS 2024! 💫 |
Jun 10, 2024 | Spending the 2024 summer at Amazon as an applied scientist intern! |
May 20, 2024 | Graduated with a MSE in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from the Whiting School of Engineering at JHU! 🎓 |
Feb 5, 2024 | Received the MINDS fellowship for Spring 2024 🏆 |
Jan 9, 2024 | Passed my doctoral board oral (DBO) exam. Officially a PhD candidate now! 🎓 |
Aug 22, 2023 | Attended CoLLAs 2023, Montreal, Cananda. |
Jul 22, 2023 | Attended ICML 2023, Honolulu, HI. |
May 15, 2023 | Our paper on “Prospective Learning: Principled Extrapolation to the Future” was accepted to CoLLAs 2023! 💫 |
Apr 24, 2023 | “The Value of Out-of-Distribution Data” was accepted to ICML 2023! 💫 |
Feb 27, 2023 | New paper on “Approximately optimal domain adaptation with Fisher’s Linear Discriminant Analysis” (in collaboration with Microsoft Research) out in arXiv! 💫 |
Dec 3, 2022 | Attended NeurIPS 2023, New Orleans, LA. |
Oct 23, 2022 | Our work on “The Value of Out-of-Distribution Data” won the best short paper award at the OOD-CV workshop, ECCV 2022! 🏆 |
Oct 20, 2022 | 1 Paper accepted to the NeurIPS 2022 workshop on Distribution Shift, New Orleans, LA! 💫 |
Aug 22, 2022 | Our paper titled “The Value of Out-of-Distribution Data” got accepted to the OOD Generalization in Computer Vision workshop at ECCV 2022, Tel Aviv, Israel! 💫 |
Jul 17, 2022 | Attended ICML 2022, Baltimore, MD in person. |
Jun 19, 2022 | Attended CVPR 2022, New Orleans, LA in person. |
Apr 5, 2022 | Attended NAISys 2022 (From Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems) held in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY. |
Aug 31, 2021 | Started my PhD in Johns Hopkins, Moved to Baltimore, MD. |
Jun 6, 2021 | Attended ICASSP 2021 virtually. |
Jan 30, 2021 | Our phase unwrapping paper got accepted to ICASSP 2021, Toronto, Canada. |
Jan 6, 2021 | Received Prof. Pathuwathawithana Memorial Prize for the Highest GPA at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. |
Dec 4, 2020 | Received a National Merit award from SLAAS for our undergraduate research project. |
Aug 24, 2020 | Graduated from University of Moratuwa (top of the Faculty of Engineering’s class of 2020). |
Aug 20, 2020 | One paper accepcted to IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) 2020, Toronto, Canada. |
Jul 23, 2020 | Completed my tenure as the Chairperson of the IEEE EMBS Student Branch Chapter at University of Moratuwa (term 2019/20). |