Linear Squared drawing best minds in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Pioneers in AI-driven business solutions in Sri Lanka, Linear Squared recently brought on board Prabath Gunawardane, an ex-Google Engineer and a Ph.D. in Computer Science as CTO and Devini Senaratna, M.S. (Stanford University) as Chief Data Scientist of the company.

Coincidentally both Mr. Gunawardane and Mr. Senaratna are alumni of the University of Colombo, who have topped their respective batches during their undergraduate years, a media release by the company said.

Speaking on his motivation to join Linear Squared, Mr. Gunawardane was quoted as saying, “I have known Sankha ( Sankha Muthu Poruthotage Ph.D - CEO) for 18 years. After he founded Linear Squared, we obviously kept each other closely updated about our start-up journeys. He approached me about coming on-board after Linear Squared started their product shift last year. I found the premise of 'big-data to proactive actions' very interesting. I had a chat with the team, looked at the products in depth, and collaborated on some of the technical problems. I found the algorithmic challenges to be extremely interesting and the people to be smart and engaging. I was also excited to build game changing products from scratch. All this made the decision rather simple at the end of the day.”

After a short stint as an Assistant Lecturer, Mr. Gunawardane went on to complete his Ph.D. at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011 and specializes in Computer Graphics, Vision, and Machine Learning. Since then he served as a Software Engineer at Google Maps till co-founding his own start-up, SleepScale in 2016.

Ms. Senaratne obtained her BSc from the University of Colombo and spent the next two years working for the University of Colombo, both as an Assistant Lecturer and Primary Statistician on multiple Social Policy Research projects with organisations such as the World Bank. She went on to complete her M. S. at Stanford University, US. Prior to Linear Squared, she had a long and successful stint as a senior Machine Learning Engineer for Roam Analytics in the US, a leading AI and ML product company for the health sector, according to the media release.