Sanjaya Wijeratne

R. M. Wattegedara Sanjaya Wijeratne holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Wright State University. He successfully defended his dissertation titled "A Framework to Understand Emoji Meaning: Similarity and Sense Disambiguation of Emoji using EmojiNet" on the 19th of November, 2018 and is currently on the job market. He was attached to the Semantic Web Lab at Kno.e.sis Center and advised by Prof. Amit Sheth. His research is focused on Emoji Understanding, Emoji Sense Disambiguation, Word Sense Disambiguation and Natural Language Processing. His work on building EmojiNet, the first machine-readable emoji sense inventory and utilizing it to solve emoji sense disambiguation and emoji similarity problems were covered in several media stories including WIRED.com and all EmojiNet-related datasets have been open sourced via Kaggle. During his graduate studies at Wright State University, he has won several awards including the Graduate Student Excellence Award in recognition of the outstanding academic achievements in the Ph.D. Program in Computer Science and Engineering during the academic year 2017 - 2018 and the Graduate Council Fellowship Award during 2011 - 2013. Before moving to the USA, he studied at the Faculty of Information Technology - University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka for his bachelors in Information Technology where he obtained a first class honors, becoming the top of the class and winning the gold medal for the best GPA obtained by an undergraduate student of the Faculty of Information Technology - University of Moratuwa.

Recent News

Current Projects

Past Projects

  • eDrugTrends
    2014 September - 2015 December

    The ultimate goal of this project is to decrease the burden of psychoactive substance use in the United States by developing an innovative software platform capable of semi-automated processing of social media data to identify emerging trends in cannabis and synthetic cannabinoid use in the USA. My contributions lie in data pre-processing and filtering where I study how to employ Word Sense Disambiguation techniques to filter noisy tweets collected using highly ambiguous tweet collecting keywords. To read more about this project please visit this link.
    Publications - [DAD Journal '15] | [CPDD '15] | [INSIGHT '14].

  • Continuous Semantics for Crawling Events
    2013 December - 2014 April

    Twitter has become one of the major platforms that people would go to when it comes to air their opinions on various topics such as natural disasters and politics. Moreover, it has become the platform of choice for first responders to disseminate information in disaster situations and different socially and politically active groups to communicate among themselves to carry out their campaigns, making Twitter a tool that can be used to track real world events. In this project, we investigate how we can leverage Background Knowledge-bases to track the evolution of events with the help of Twitter hashtags. To read more about this project please visit the project page.

  • Temporal Entity Ranking in Evolving Events
    2013 May - 2013 December

    Entities (People, Places, Organizations etc.) associated with evolving events (Hurricane Sandy, US Election 2012 etc.) has a dynamic evolution with the changing nature of events. Here, we study how to rank such entities based on their importance varying over time.

  • Linked Open Data Property Alignment
    2012 April - 2013 April

    Ontology Property Alignment is a fundamental problem in Ontology Alignment research. Here the focus is on studying schema independent approaches to identify and align properties (relationships) appear in different datasets published in Linked Open Data Cloud.
    Publications - [iSemantics '13].

  • Kino Web
    2011 August - 2012 March

    A browser plugin to semantically annotate the content of a Web page using Schema.org vocabularies. Kino Web tool acts as a search engine and index all documents it accepts via a special interface and searches them using semantic annotations added based on Schema.org vocabularies. Read more about Kino architecture here.
    Publications - [W3C Workshp '11].

Invited Talks

  • 2019

    "Emoji Semiotics, Culture, and Society", Anthropology 189: Anthropology of Social Media : The Study of Emoji class at The University of California - Berkeley, USA. February, 2019.

  • 2018

    "Using Natural Language Processing to Understand Emoji in Social Media Text", Emojicon 2018, Brooklyn, NY, USA. July, 2018. [Slides Share]

    "Analyzing the Social Media Footprint of Street Gangs", SRV 2000: Engaged Citizenship class at Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA. March, 2018. [Slides Share] | [Slides]

  • 2016

    "Finding Street Gang Members on Twitter", Big Data Surveillance Analytics Mini Conference at Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA. July, 2016. [Slides Share] | [Slides]

Publications

  • 2018

    Sanjaya Wijeratne, A Framework to Understand Emoji Meaning: Similarity and Sense Disambiguation of Emoji using EmojiNet, Ph.D. Dissertation, Wright State University, 2018. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [Download]

    Sanjaya Wijeratne, Amit Sheth, Shreyansh Bhatt, Lakshika Balasuriya, Hussein Al-Olimat, Manas Gaur, Amir Hossein Yazdavar, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan. Feature Engineering for Twitter-based Applications, in Feature Engineering for Machine Learning and Data Analytics. Editors. Guozhu Dong and Huan Liu. Chapman and Hall/CRC Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Series. December 2017. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX]

  • 2017

    Sanjaya Wijeratne, Lakshika Balasuriya, Amit Sheth, Derek Doran. A Semantics-Based Measure of Emoji Similarity. In 2017 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (Web Intelligence 2017). Leipzig, Germany; 2017. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX] | [Slide Share] | [Slides] | [EmoSim508 Dataset]

    Amit Sheth, Sujan Perera, Sanjaya Wijeratne, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan. Knowledge will Propel Machine Understanding of Content: Extrapolating from Current Examples. In 2017 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (Web Intelligence 2017). Leipzig, Germany; 2017. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX]

    Sanjaya Wijeratne, Lakshika Balasuriya, Amit Sheth, Derek Doran. EmojiNet: An Open Service and API for Emoji Sense Discovery. In 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2017). Montreal, Canada; 2017. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX] | [Slide Share] | [Slides] | [DEMO] | [EmojiNet Dataset] | [API]

  • 2016

    Sanjaya Wijeratne, Lakshika Balasuriya, Amit Sheth, Derek Doran. EmojiNet: Building a Machine Readable Sense Inventory for Emoji. In 8th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2016). Bellevue, WA, USA; 2016. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX] | [Slides Share] | [Slides] | [DEMO]

    Lakshika Balasuriya, Sanjaya Wijeratne, Derek Doran, Amit Sheth. Signals Revealing Street Gang Members on Twitter. In Workshop on Computational Approaches to Social Modeling (ChASM 2016) co-located with 8th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2016). Bellevue, WA, USA; 2016. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX] | [Slides]

    Sanjaya Wijeratne, Lakshika Balasuriya, Amit Sheth, Derek Doran. EmojiNet: A Machine Readable Emoji Sense Inventory. Wright Brother's Day, Wright State University. Dayton, Ohio, USA; 2016. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [Abstract PDF] | [Poster PDF] | [Poster PPT] | [BibTeX] | [DEMO]

    Sanjaya Wijeratne, Lakshika Balasuriya, Derek Doran, Amit Sheth. Word Embeddings to Enhance Twitter Gang Member Profile Identification. In IJCAI Workshop on Semantic Machine Learning (SML 2016). New York City, NY: CEUR-WS; 2016. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX] | [Slides Share] | [Slides]

    Lakshika Balasuriya, Sanjaya Wijeratne, Derek Doran, Amit Sheth. Finding Street Gang Members on Twitter, In The 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2016). San Francisco, CA, USA; 2016. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX] | [Slides Share] | [Slides]

  • 2015

    Raminta Daniulaityte, Ramzi W. Nahhas, Sanjaya Wijeratne, Robert G. Carlson, Francois R. Lamy, Silvia S. Martins, Edward W. Boyer, G. Alan Smith, Amit Sheth, “Time for dabs”: Analyzing Twitter data on marijuana concentrates across the U.S., Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Volume 155, 1 October 2015, Pages 307-311, ISSN 0376-8716. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX]

    Wijeratne, S.; Doran, D.; Sheth, A.; Dustin, J.L., "Analyzing the social media footprint of street gangs," in Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), 2015 IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.91-96, 27-29 May 2015 doi: 10.1109/ISI.2015.7165945. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX] | [Poster] | [Slides Share] | [Slides]

    R. Daniulaityte, R. Carlson, F. Golroo, S. Wijeratne, E. Boyer, S. Martins, R. Nahhas, A. Sheth, “Time for dabs”: Analyzing Twitter data on butane hash oil use. The College on Problems of Drug Dependence CPDD 2015, Phoenix, Arizona, June 13-18, 2015 (Conference Poster). [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX]

  • 2014

    Sanjaya Wijeratne, Bahareh R. Heravi. A Keyword Sense Disambiguation Based Approach for Noise Filtering in Twitter. The 1st Insight Student Conference, University College Dublin, Ireland, 2014. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX] | [Poster]

  • 2013

    Kalpa Gunaratna, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Prateek Jain, Amit Sheth, Sanjaya Wijeratne, A Statistical and Schema Independent Approach for Identifying Equivalent Properties on Linked Data. In: Proc. 9th International Conference on Semantic Systems (ACM 2013), Messe Graz, Austria, 2013. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX] | [Slides]

  • 2011

    Ajith Ranabahu, Amit Sheth, Maryam Panahiazar, Sanjaya Wijeratne, Semantic Annotation and Search for resources in the next Generation Web with SA-REST. W3C Workshop on Data and Services Integration, October 20-21 2011, Bedford, MA, USA. [Kno.e.sis Library Page] | [PDF] | [BibTeX] | [Slides]

Media & Press Coverage

  • 2018

    "Academics Gathered to Share Emoji Research, and It was Lit", written by Arielle Pardes, Senior Editor, WIRED.COM, June, 2018. [Link to Article]

    "Universal Language or Culturally Specific Symbols, What Do Emojis Really Mean?", written by Rakhi Bose, News 18, June, 2018. [Link to Article]

    "Wired: Wright State Researchers Organize Academic Conference on Emoji Research", Wright State University News Room, June, 2018. [Link to Article]

    "Gang Guidance: Wright State Researchers Develop Computer Tool Designed to Reduce Street-gang Violence", written by Jim Hannah, Assistant Director of Public Relations, Communications, and Marketing at Wright State University, March, 2018. [Link to Article]

    "Wright State Defines Emojis", written by Carolyn Harmon for The Daily Advocate, January, 2018. [Link to Article]

    "Wright State Student Develops Emoji Software", written by Jim Hannah for The Sidney Daily News, January, 2018. [Link to Article]

    "KnoEmoji Empire: Wright State Researchers Develop Database that Promises to Improve Emoji Communication", written by Jim Hannah, Assistant Director of Public Relations, Communications, and Marketing at Wright State University, January, 2018. [Link to Article]

  • 2017

    "Can Computers "Get" Emoji? EmojiNet Says YES!", written by Sarah Vickers-Webb, a freelance writer and content manager at Emoji Foundation, December, 2017. [Link to Article]

    "EmojiNet is now a Kaggle-featured dataset", EmojiNet was uploaded to Kaggle by Rachael Tatman, November, 2017. [Link to EmojiNet Kaggle Page]

    "Do You Know What That Emoji Means?", written by Marlynn Wei (M.D., J.D.), for Psychology Today, October, 2017. [Link to Article]

    "Twitter: How Social Media Intersects with Influence, Jihad, Gangs, Drugs", written by Michael Martinez and Lori Cameron, for IEEE Intelligent Systems, October, 2017. [Link to Article]

  • 2016

    "Researchers Claim AI Can Identify Gang Members on Twitter", Motherboard (Vice.com) article by Jordan Pearson, November, 2016. [Link to Article] | [Our Response]

    "Ultimate Guide to Emoji Meanings and How to Use them in Social Media", dlvr.it Blog by Debra Garber, August, 2016. [Link to Article]

Research Experience

Awards & Honors

| © Sanjaya Wijeratne. Last Updated on January 2019.

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