Amarasinghe, Pathinarage Ishari Uthpala
AMARASINGHE, PATHINARAGE ISHARI UTHPALA
Ishari Amarasinghe is a postdoctoral researcher at the TIDE Research Group on Interactive and Distributed Technologies for Education, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona. She received her Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technologies (Excellent Summa Cum Laude with an International Mention) in 2020 at UPF. Her Ph.D thesis titled The Orchestration of Computer-Supported Collaboration Scripts with Learning Analytics was co-supervised by Prof. Davinia Hernández-Leo and Prof. Anders Jonsson at UPF. The thesis focused on studying the orchestration challenges associated with scripted computer-supported collaborative learning situations on small scale (in the classroom) and large scales (in the distance learning contexts) to design and implement learning analytics interventions range from human-in-control to machine-in-control in nature given the feasibility and regulation needs of the learning contexts under investigation. During her Ph.D she has also completed short research stays at the COLLIDE research group at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany and at the CHILI research group at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
Ishari received her M.Sc. degree in Intelligent Interactive Systems from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, in 2016. She received B.Sc. in Information and Communication Technologies (First Class) from the University of Colombo School of Computing, Sri Lanka. She owns experience in teaching and conducting interdisciplinary research. Her research interests focus on the use of learning analytics techniques to support teachers to conduct fruitful computer-supported collaborative learning activities.
Honours and Awards
2017 - Full scholarship by Anita Borg Institute (sponsored by Amazon) to attend Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) Conference, Florida, USA.
2017 - Participation Scholarship - ACM womENcourage, Barcelona, Spain.
2013 - Gold Medal, Best Final Year Undergraduate Research - University of Colombo General Convocation, Sri Lanka.
Guest Lectures & Research Talks
2020 - Guest lecture presentation on “Qualitative Methods and Studies in Learning Analytics” at MIT EdTech Studio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States.
2020- E-learning research talk on “Collaborative Learning Scripts and Learning Analytics” at Human-Computer Interaction Research Group, Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT), Sri Lanka.