Recent News

• 2019

  February 2019 : I’m thrilled to give a guest lecture at The University of California - Berkeley on Emoji Semiotics, Culture, and Society.
  
  January 2019 : I’m on the job market. If you are hiring, please drop me a line at sanjaya@knoesis.org
  
  January 2019 : Following the successful Ph.D. defense, I was informed by the Graduate School of Wright State University that they awarded me the Ph.D.! My Ph.D. dissertation is now available online. [Download]
  

  2018

  November 2018 : I successfully defended my dissertation titled "A Framework to Understand Emoji Meaning: Similarity and Sense Disambiguation of Emoji using EmojiNet" on the 19th of November, 2018. My Ph.D. dissertation is now available online. [Download]
  
  November 2018 : I’m co-organizing , Emoji2019, the 2nd International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media co-located with The Web Conference 2019 (formerly WWW). Please submit your papers here.
  
  July 2018 : I will be talking at Emojicon 2018 on building EmojiNet and applications of it. [Slides Share]
  
  June 2018 : My research was featured in WIRED.com. [WIRED.com Artcle]
  
  June 2018 : I’m co-organizing Emoji2018 workshop at ICWSM-2018. I will also be giving a tutorial and moderating a panel on the challenges of emoji understanding. [Tutorial Slides]
  

Current Projects

• EmojiNet and Emoji Understanding

  2016 July - Present

  Emoji is a contemporary, extremely popular way to enhance electronic communications. Without rigid semantics attached to them, an emoji symbol can take on different meanings based on the context of a message. Analogous to the word sense disambiguation task in natural language processing, machines also need to disambiguate the meaning of an emoji or ‘sense’ of an emoji. The goal of this project is to build tools and algorithms to improve machine understandability of emoji. We built the first machine readable sense inventory for emoji called EmojiNet (DEMO). To read more about this project please visit this link.
  Publications - [Ph.D. Dissertation '18] | [Web Intelligence '17] | [ICWSM '17] | [SocInfo '16] | [Wright Brother's Day '16].
  Press Coverage - [WIRED.com] | [News 18] | [Wright State News] | [Wright State News] | [The Daily Advocate] | [Sindey Daily News] | [Emoji Foundation] | [Kaggle] | [Psychology Today] | [dlvr.it Blog].

• Understanding Gang Activities in Social Media

  2014 September - Present

  In this project, we try to understand how street gang members (self-identified in their Twitter profiles) use social media. We try to develop algorithms to identify gang member Twitter profiles automatically using the language they use in social media posts, using the profile descriptions and/or their follower/followee networks. Read more about this in our related project page: Project Safe Neighborhood - Westwood Partnership to Prevent Juvenile Repeat Offenders.
  Publications - [ASONAM '16] | [SML@IJCAI '16] | [ChASM@SocInfo '16] | [WSU Big Data '16] | [IEEE ISI '15].
  Press Coverage - [Wright State News] | [IEEE Intelligent Systems] | [Motherboard (Vice.com) Article] | [Our Response].

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

• Research Assistant at Kno.e.sis Center

  2011 August - Present

  Working as a Research Assistant at Kno.e.sis Center, Department of Computer Science and Engineering - Wright State University exploring research problems related to Emoji Understanding and Emoji Sense Disambiguation, Social Computing, Word Sense Disambiguation and Natural Language Processing. Please refer to Research page for more information about his work at Kno.e.sis.

• Research Intern at I2R|A*Star

  2016 January - 2016 April

  Successfully completed a 16 weeks internship program at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) - A*Star, Singapore. Worked with the Text Analytics and Semantics Group at Data Analytics Department on entity linking in short text descriptions appear in private merchant datasets.

• Research Intern at Insight Center|DERI

  2014 May - 2014 August

  Successfully completed a 15 weeks internship program at the Insight Center for Data Analytics (formerly DERI), Galway - Ireland. Worked with the Digital Humanities and Journalism (HuJo) group on a sub-module of the RTÉ News360 project to filter noisy tweets collected by keywords-based tweet filtering methods using Word Sense Disambiguation. Read the extended abstract presented on this work at the Insight Student Conference 2014 here.

Work Experience

• Software Engineer (J2SE) at CodeGen Intl.

  2009 November - 2011 July

  Worked as a J2SE Software Engineer at CodeGen International (Pvt) Ltd - Sri Lanka for a period of 1 year and 9 months. Contributed to designing and development of cutting edge travel software called TravelBox, integrating third-party host to host systems for flight and cruise bookings. Integrated and worked with leading GDSes while engaging in customer requirement gathering sessions. Technologies Used - J2SE, Web Services.

• Industrial Trainee at Virtusa Corporation

  2007 October - 2008 April

  Worked as a Software Engineering Intern (Java) at Virtusa Corporation (Pvt) Ltd - Sri Lanka for a period of six months. Designed and developed self-describing on the fly GUI generation software to represent any given XML document and a tool to calculate the complexity of a given XML document according to Software Engineering Matrices. Technologies Used - J2SE, Web Services, Java Swing Framework, DOM and SAX Parsers for XML processing in Java.

Teaching Experience

• Teaching Assistant at Wright State University

  Spring 2014

  Worked as a Teaching Assistant attached to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State University for CS1150 - Introduction to Computer Science course taught by Mr. Chris Fickert.
  Class Meeting Times - 10:10 am - 11:05 am, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at Room 152C - Russ Center.
  Labs Meeting Times - 2:30 pm - 4:20 pm, Monday at Room 320 - Oelman Hall.
  TA Office Hours - 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm, Monday at Room 316 - Russ Engineering Center.
  Lab Slides - Lab 2 | Lab 3 | Lab 4 | Lab 8 | JavaScript Lab | Lab 12B | Lab 13 | Lab 15 | Lab 16

• Teaching Assistant at Wright State University

  Fall 2013

  Worked as a Teaching Assistant attached to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State University for CS1150 - Introduction to Computer Science course taught by Ms. Karen A. Meyer.
  Class Meeting Times - 10:10 am - 11:05 am / 11:15 am - 12:10 pm, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at Room 152C - Russ Center.
  Labs Meeting Times - 2:30 pm - 4:20 pm, Monday and Friday at Room 320 - Oelman Hall.
  TA Office Hours - 4:40 pm - 5:40 pm, Monday and Friday at Room 316 - Russ Engineering Center.
  Lab Slides - Lab 2 | Lab 3 | Lab 4 | Lab 8 | JavaScript Lab | Lab 12B | Lab 13 | Lab 15 | Lab 16

• Grader at Wright State University

  Fall 2013

  Worked as a Grader attached to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State University for CS1010 - Introduction to Computers and Office Productivity Software course taught by Ms. Terri M. Bauer.
  Class Meeting Times - 10:10 am - 11:05 am / 12:20 pm - 1:15 pm, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at Room 320 - Oelman Hall.

Awards & Honors

• Outstanding Student Award in the Ph.D. Program in Computer Science and Engineering

  2018

  Awarded the Graduate Student Excellence Award (a.k.a. Outstanding Student Award) by the Graduate School of Wright State University, in recognition of the outstanding academic achievements in the Ph.D. Program in Computer Science and Engineering during the academic year 2017 - 2018. Each graduate program may nominate only one student for this award.

• ICWSM-18 Student Grant Award

  2018

  Received a travel grant of $350 to attend the ICWSM 2018 conference.

• WSU Graduate Council Fellowship Recipient

  2011 - 2013

  Awarded the Graduate Council Fellowship by the College of Engineering and Computer Science of Wright State University beginning Fall 2011 up to two years which consists of a monthly stipend and a full tuition scholarship. Each graduate program may nominate only one student for this award.

• Gold Medalist and Top of the Class

  2009

  Became top of the class (equivalent to Valedictorian) out of 102 students and won the Gold Medal for the Information Technology Graduate who obtained the highest overall GPA at the B.Sc Information Technology Honors Degree Program conducted by the Faculty of Information Technology - University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.

• Dean's List Award

  2005 - 2009

  Won a place in Dean's List in five academic semesters for the outstanding academic performance by achieving a semester GPA above 3.80 at the B.Sc Information Technology Honors Degree Program conducted by the Faculty of Information Technology - University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.