Nisansa Dilushan de Silva

I am a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. I obtained my Ph.D (2020, advisor: Dejing Dou) and MS (2016) degrees in Computer and Information Science from University of Oregon, USA and my BSc (Hons) in Computer Science & Engineering (2011) degree from University of Moratuwa. I joined University of Moratuwa as a lecturer in 2011. From 2013 to 2014, I worked as a researcher at LIRNEasia. In 2018, I worked as a Givens Associate at Argonne National Laboratory, USA. I have over 80 peer reviewed publications in the field of computer science, mostly under the subfields of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, earning more than 1400 citations. I am also an associate member of the IESL.

Professional Experience

  • Present 2020

    Senior Lecturer

    Department of Computer science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2021 2020

    Research Fellow

    LIRNEasia,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2020 2014

    Graduate Research/Teaching Fellow

    University of Oregon, Department of Computer and Information Science,
    USA.

  • 2018 2018

    Givens Associate

    Argonne National Laboratory,
    USA.

  • 2020 2011

    Lecturer

    Department of Computer science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2014 2013

    Researcher

    LIRNEasia,
    Sri Lanka

  • 2014 2013

    Visiting Lecturer

    Northshore College of Business and Technology,
    Sri Lanka

Education

  • Ph.D. 2020

    Ph.D. in Computer & Information Science

    University of Oregon, USA

  • MS 2016

    MS in Computer & Information Science

    University of Oregon, USA

  • BSc2011

    B.Sc Engineering (Hons)in Computer Science & Engineering

    University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Featured Research

Sinhala Physical Common Sense Reasoning Dataset for Global PIQA


N. de Silva, and S. Ranathunga

arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.02207, 2026,

This paper presents the first-ever Sinhala physical common sense reasoning dataset created as part of Global PIQA. It contains 110 human-created and verified data samples, where each sample consists of a prompt, the corresponding correct answer, and a wrong answer. Most of the questions refer to the Sri Lankan context, where Sinhala is an official language.