Channa has over 20 years of experience in providing management consulting and advisory services to multi-nationals and diversified conglomerates in Sri Lanka. Channa has advised clients in business expansion, transformation including growth strategy encompassing organic and inorganic growth. He has facilitated expansion strategies to emerging markets including cross-border transaction advisory services.

Channa served as a Board member in SLASSCOM from 2015 onwards and was previously a member of SLASSCOM’s General Council, Marketing Forum, BPM Forum, and Entrepreneurship and Innovation Forum.

Romesh is a Co-Founder and the CTO of Tengri UAV, a global provider of UAV technology and applications. Tengri UAV is a Sri Lanka and Singapore based company. Tengri focuses on the development and application of UAV technology built upon a proprietary UAV stack. The Tengri UAV stack includes on-board hardware and computing resources, ground station hardware, software, Ai integration, multiple networking modes and a full-stack UAV simulator. Tengri is based in Singapore and Sri Lanka, and has UAV customers in more than 30 countries.

Romesh also co-founded SimCentric Technologies in 2008, and was the companies Managing Director and CTO until his exit from the company in 2019. Romesh founded SimCentric Technologies (Pvt) Ltd. in Sri Lanka and lead the Sri lanka office. He also lead product development and innovation at SimCentric.

Romesh is also a member of the Board of Management of the University of Colombo School of Computing.

Romesh is a Clarendon Scholar with a Doctorate in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Oxford and holds a 1st Class Degree in Computer Science from the University of Peradeniya. He also has over 15 peer-reviewed international publications on Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning.

Marija Slavkovik is an Associate professor with the Faculty for Social Sciences of the University of Bergen. She is a computer scientist who does research in AI. She works mainly in collective reasoning and decision making. She has been doing research in machine ethics since 2012. Machine ethics studies how moral reasoning can be automated. Marija works on formalising ethical collective decision-making. She
has held held several seminars, tutorials and graduate courses on AI ethics (http://slavkovik.com/teaching.html). Marija is interested in the phenomenon of autonomous systems increasingly becoming moral arbitrators by virtue of the dissipation of the machine-society segregation. Automation, particularly of cognition, is not always possible without automating aspect of ethic reasoning or values. The problem then is whose moral values should have standing and how can we resolve conflicts among the different views and interests.

Jerome (Jay) leads a team of multidisciplinary technology professionals focused on driving innovation through data sciences and AI. He has 14 years of experience in Data Sciences, Machine Learning and Business Analytics. Throughout his career he has worked in multiple countries and has experience working with F500 corporations to start-ups in major industry verticals. His expertise is in driving organizational value by using data and technology to innovate and disrupt industry practices. Jay holds in total 18 years of experience in IT services and has played multiple roles in software development, project management and systems engineering. He holds a Master’s degree in Quantitative Sciences and a BSc in Management Information Systems from UCD Ireland.

Lysne is a director of Simula Metropolitan, and professor of Communication Systems at the Oslo Metropolitan University. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Oslo, and his experience in research, education, management and innovation reaches back to 1989. He is author of the book “The Huawei and Snowden Questions”, that debates the consequences of our limited ability to verify electronic equipment from potentially untrusted vendors. Lysne has had several governmental positions in his home country. He headed the national commission on digital vulnerabilities in 2014/2015. He later headed the commission that evaluated the use of lawful interception of Internet-traffic crossing the national borders of Norway, paving the way for new legislation for the National Intelligence Service. Internationally he is most known for his work on digital supply- and value chains, and in the wake of his book on Huawei and 5G, he has given a series of talks and interviews both in Europe and the US.

Nisha Talagala is the CEO and founder of Pyxeda AI. She is also the founder of AIClub.World which is bringing AI Literacy to K-12 students and individuals worldwide. Nisha has significant experience in introducing technologies like Artificial Intelligence to new learners from students to professionals. Previously, Nisha co-founded ParallelM which pioneered the MLOps practice of managing Machine Learning in production for enterprises - acquired by DataRobot. Nisha is a recognized leader in the operational machine learning space, having also driven the USENIX Operational ML Conference, the first industry/academic conference on production AI/ML. Nisha was previously a Fellow at SanDisk and Fellow/Lead Architect at Fusion-io, where she worked on innovation in non-volatile memory technologies and applications. Nisha has more than 20 years of expertise in enterprise software development, distributed systems, technical strategy and product leadership. She has worked as technology lead for server flash at Intel - where she led server platform non-volatile memory technology development, storage-memory convergence, and partnerships. Prior to Intel, Nisha was the CTO of Gear6, where she designed and built clustered computing caches for high performance I/O environments. Nisha earned her PhD at UC Berkeley where she did research on clusters and distributed systems. Nisha holds 73 patents in distributed systems and software, over 25 refereed research publications, is a frequent speaker at industry and academic events, and is a contributing writer to Forbes and other publications.

Johan Loeckx started as a micropreneur when he was 16. He received a MSc. in Engineering, a MSc. in AI and a PhD from K.U.Leuven. He co-designed the Belgian encryption system for exchanging health information for which a patent was filed. He co-founded a Freinet school and is an active musician. Johan is assistant professor, manages the applied R&D team at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels and initiator of its lifelong learning programme.

Emi Yuda was born in Tokyo, Japan. She received Ph.D. from Nihon University and D.Eng. from Niigata University. From 2013 to 2014, she was a research assistant at Santa Monica College in California, USA. From 2015 to 2019, she was a NEDO project researcher in Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Nagoya City University. From 2019 to 2020, she was an assistant professor in Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University. Since 2020, she has been an assistant professor in Center for Data-driven Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tohoku University. Her currently research is Medical Informatics, Data Science and Bio-signal Processing. She has many achievements in field of Informatics and Big Data

Dr. Morten Goodwin is a professor at UiA and deputy director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research. Morten Goodwin (born 1980) was introduced to artificial intelligence when he took a master's degree in Agder in the 2000s, and he has been bitten by the bacillus ever since. He later went to Denmark to specialize in a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and is now an active researcher with more than 110 peers behind him. Dr. Goodwin teaches daily about artificial intelligence for bachelor, master, and Ph.D. students. He is also an active popular science communicator focusing on the enormous advances in both research and artificial intelligence's practical usefulness. In the autumn of 2020, he published the book "AI. Myten om maskinene"

Nuwan is a Technology Professional, specializing in Enterprise Software Development & Distributed Development of Software. Corporate Strategy and Quantitative Finance enthusiast.

Madu is the Global CIO and the Center Head for Virtusa Sri Lanka. He is responsible for Virtusa’s global digital strategy and Virtusa’s Sri Lankan Operations. As the Group CIO, he focuses on building Virtusa’s award winning digital platform and practices that enable harnessing the collective wisdom and relationships of global network of team members to drive delivery, sales, customer and people engagement.

Madu is an independent non-executive Director of the Hatton National Bank, Director of Information Communication Technology Agency (ICTA), the National Agency for Digital Government and Sri Lanka CERT, the National Agency for Cyber Security. He plays number of advisory roles in state and private institutes. He is the former Chairman and current Member of the Strategy Council of the Sri Lanka Association for Software and Services Companies (SLASSCOM), the national chamber for IT and BPM industry in Sri Lanka. He is also an active advisor to number of academic institutions and technology startups.

He is a Charted Engineer and holds an MBA from the Postgraduate Institute of Management and an Honors Degree in Software Engineering from City University in London.

Dr. Rukshan Batuwita has been working in Data Science/applied Machine Learning in both industry and academia for the last 13 years.

Previously he worked as the Lead Data Scientist at Woolworths Group and Senior Data Scientist at Ambiata Ltd in Australia, where he was a founding employee. During his time in academia, he held research positions at National ICT Australia, MIT, Imperial College London, and completed his PhD at the University of Oxford, UK in Machine Learning and BSc in Computer Science at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.

A former Director of the University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), he has also served as a Visiting Professor at the Management & Science University of Malaysia (MSU) in 2010-2011, visiting Faculty at the Umea University of Sweden in the Fall of 2013 and Dean of the Informatics Institute of Technology, Sri Lanka in 2015/2016. In 2001 he was an ERCIM Fellow at France’s INRIA Labs and in 2002, a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Carnegie-Mellon University’s Language Technology Institute in Pittsburgh, USA. His research interests are in Computational Linguistics including Machine Translation, and particularly in techniques employing statistical methods and machine learning on large datasets. They expand naturally to Artificial Intelligence and more recently to Bioinformatics and Complex Adaptive Systems. He is also the current Chairman of Theekshana, the Technology Company incubated out of the UCSC.

Jeevan strives to be an entrepreneurial idea generator like his grandfather late Mr. A. Y. S Gnanam, founder of St. Anthony’s Group (SA Group). SA Group is one of the oldest and largest conglomerates which pioneered industrialization in Sri Lanka by manufacturing textiles, building materials, plastic products, industrial fasteners, cement, fiber cement and corrugated roofing sheets.

Jeevan is the visionary behind Sri Lanka’s first operational IT Park – Orion City, home to some of the world’s leading IT firms. Since its inception in 2008, Orion City has experienced steady growth and has achieved it's goal of 1Mn square feet facility by 2020.


He also serves as the CEO of Anton one of the largest plastic manufacturers in the country. His commitment and dedication to innovation and quality has embedded Anton as a trusted leader in the hearts of the Sri Lankan people. Anton throughout it’s history for six decades has spearheaded many firsts in plastics manufacturing in Sri Lanka and now leads the way in sustainable development.

Providence founded by Jeevan and his brother in 2007 serves as a web application development company. This has now grown to include Providence BPO. His latest venture SAKS (SA Knowledge Services), incorporated in 2012 now offers customized and flexible outsourcing solutions in financial services, research & analytics and legal process outsourcing.


Jeevan Gnanam is a mentor and facilitator for entrepreneurial development for youth in Sri Lanka. He is active member of SLASSCOM and helps in many initiatives driven by the Entrepreneurship and Marketing Forum. Jeevan Gnanam is a founder member of the Lanka Angel Network, which targets Sri Lankan entrepreneurs and companies and helps them to grow by providing venture capital and mentorship.

Specialties: Business managment, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Economist, web development, web 2.0, AJAX, innovation, php, java, mysql, J2ME, J2EE, ruby, rails, linux, flex, flash,

Sadeep Jayasumana is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Research, New York. His research interests are in the areas of computer vision and deep learning. Before joining Google, Sadeep was a computer vision researcher at a UK-based self-driving car startup. He has also worked as a machine learning researcher at Man AHL, a London-based quantitative hedge fund. During his time in academia, Sadeep completed a Postdoc at the University of Oxford, and a PhD at the Australian National University - both in computer vision. He obtained his understrague degree from University of Moratuwa.

Inga has a master's degree in theoretical physics and a PhD in particle physics. She has worked on cyber security, in the oil industry as a petrophysicist, and on responsible AI and algorithm audits as a manager at Price Waterhouse Coopers. She is currently a researcher in explainable AI at Simula, specialising in statistical and game-theoretic approaches to XAI. Inga is an international keynote speaker, TEDx speaker and podcast host. She is co-founded and serves as deputy head of the board in Norway's Council on Digital Ethics, and an active participant in the national public discourse on AI and data sharing.

He is a Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and the Director of the Information Technology Research Unit at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. He serves as the consultant in artificial intelligence at Mobitel (Pvt) Ltd. He is an active member of IEEE and the treasurer of IEEE Robotics and Automation Sri Lanka Section. He obtained his Doctor of Engineering degree in Natural Language Processing in 2015 and Master of Management and Information Systems Engineering degree in 2012 from Nagaoka University of Technology, Nagoaka, Japan. He completed the bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Technology from Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka in 2008. His main research interests include Natural Language Processing, Machine learning, Big data analytics, and Robotics Applications.