I am a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) and the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University. My research interests are Crowdsourcing, Social Computing and Human-Computer Interaction.
I completed my PhD on data quality in crowdsourcing at the School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, where I was part of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group.
During my PhD, I worked as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon (AWS), a tutor at the School of Computing and Information Systems, and the Manager of User Experience Lab, where I supported a wide range of HCI research projects. I have previously worked as a Full-Stack Software Engineer, primarily focused on data engineering and analytics.
Find my up-to-date CV here.
Watch a 3-minute summary of my latest research here.
Working with the Machines programme at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) and School of Computing Technologies at the RMIT University.
Working with Amazon GroundTruth, MTurk and Augmented AI (A2I) team. Mentored by Associate Prof. Matthew Lease
Work as a tutor at School of Computing & Information Systems, Melbourne School of Engineering.
User Experience Lab is a research facility at the Interaction Design Lab, School of Computing & Information Systems. I supported a wide range of HCI research projects under my role.
Worked in the data and analytics team. Principal engineer of customer profiling project, a solution to gather customer insights from over 2000 restaurants. Also engaged with a real time ETL built using Apache Storm, a data warehouse for reports and data archival project.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering.
Integrated a data cleaning tool to WSO2 Machine Learner by creating data transformations in Apache Spark to enhance the data preprocessing capabilities of the platform.
Built an R extension for WSO2 Machine Learner to generate and execute machine learning algorithms in R. Created an application to monitor Jenkins build failures using WSO2 Complex Event Processor.
Supervised by Dr. Jorge Goncalves and Prof. Vassilis Kostakos at School of Computing and Information Systems.
First Class. Specialized in Computer Science and Engineering
S. Wijenayake, D. Hettiachchi, J. Goncalves (2023). Combining Worker Factors for Heterogeneous Crowd Task Assignment. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Web Conference (WWW’23) (pp. 3794-3805). [doi] [pdf-acm] [pdf] [talk]
H. Kegalle, D. Hettiachchi, J. Chan, F. Salim, M. Sanderson (2023). Are Footpaths Encroached by Shared e-Scooters? Spatio-temporal Analysis of Micro-mobility Service. In Proceedings of The 24th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM’23), to appear. [arxiv]
K. Ji, D. Spina, D. Hettiachchi, F. Salim, F. Scholer (2023). Examining the Impact of Uncontrolled Variables on Physiological Signals in User Studies for Information Processing Activities. In Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR’23), to appear. [arxiv]
Z. Sarsenbayeva, N. van Berkel, D. Hettiachchi, B. Tag, E. Velloso, J. Goncalves, V. Kostakos (2023). Mapping 20 Years of Accessibility Research in HCI: A Co-word Analysis. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 175, 103108. [doi] [pdf]
E. Small, Y. Xuan, D. Hettiachchi, K. Sokol (2023). Helpful, Misleading or Confusing: How Humans Perceive Fundamental Building Blocks of Artificial Intelligence Explanations. In ACM CHI 2023 Workshop on Human-Centered Explainable AI (HCXAI). [arxiv]
D. Hettiachchi, V. Kostakos, J. Goncalves (2022). A Survey on Task Assignment in Crowdsourcing. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 55(3), 1-35. [doi] [pdf] [arxiv]
S. Seneviratne, N. Kasthuriarachchi, S. Rasnayaka, D. Hettiachchi, R. Shariffdeen (2022). Does a Face Mask Protect my Privacy?: Deep Learning to Predict Protected Attributes from Masked Face Images. In Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 91-102). Springer, Cham. [doi] [pdf]
A. Alorwu, S. Savage, N. van Berkel, D. Ustalov, A. Drutsa, J. Oppenlaender, O. Bates, D. Hettiachchi, U. Gadiraju, J. Goncalves, S. Hosio (2022). Reimagining Global Crowdsourcing for Better Human-AI Collaboration. In Adjunct Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’22 EA). [doi] [pdf] [website]
D. Hettiachchi, M. Schaekermann, T. McKinney, M. Lease (2021). The Challenge of Variable Effort Crowdsourcing and How Visible Gold Can Help. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5 (CSCW2), 332:1-332:26. [doi] [pdf-acm] [pdf] [arxiv] [talk] [dataset]
D. Hettiachchi, T. Arora, J. Goncalves (2021). Us vs. Them - Understanding the Impact of Homophily in Political Discussions on Twitter. Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT’21). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Cham. [doi] [pdf] [talk]
D. Hettiachchi, L. Hayes, J. Goncalves, V. Kostakos (2021). Team Dynamics in Hospital Workflows: An Exploratory Study of a Smartphone Task Manager. JMIR Medical Informatics, 9(8), e28245. [doi] [pdf]
D. Hettiachchi, M. Sanderson, J. Goncalves, S. Hosio, G. Kazai, M. Lease, M. Schaekermann, E. Yilmaz (2021). Investigating and Mitigating Biases in Crowdsourced Data. Companion Publication of the 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ’21 Companion). [doi] [pdf] [proceedings] [website]
D. Hettiachchi (2021). Task Assignment using Worker Cognitive Ability and Context to Improve Data Quality in Crowdsourcing. (Doctoral Thesis, The University of Melbourne, Australia). [record] [pdf]
V. Paananen, J. Oppenlaender, J. Goncalves, D. Hettiachchi, S. Hosio (2021). Investigating Human Scale Spatial Experience. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5 (ISS), 496:1-496:18. [doi] [pdf]
D. Hettiachchi, N. van Berkel, V. Kostakos, J. Goncalves (2020). CrowdCog: A Cognitive Skill based System for Heterogeneous Task Assignment and Recommendation in Crowdsourcing. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4 (CSCW2), 110:1-110:22. [doi] [pdf-acm] [pdf] [code] [talk]
D. Hettiachchi, S. Wijenayake, S. Hosio, V. Kostakos, J. Goncalves (2020). How Context Influences Cross-Device Task Acceptance in Crowd Work. In Proceedings of the Eighth AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP’20). 53-62. [doi] [pdf]
D. Hettiachchi, Z. Sarsenbayeva, F. Allison, N. van Berkel, T. Dingler, G. Marini, V. Kostakos, J. Goncalves (2020). "Hi! I am the Crowd Tasker" Crowdsourcing through Digital Voice Assistants. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2020 (CHI’20). [doi] [pdf] [media]
D. Hettiachchi, N. van Berkel, S. Hosio, M. B. Lopez, V. Kostakos, J. Goncalves (2020). Augmenting Automated Kinship Verification with Targeted Human Input. In Proceedings of the Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems 2020 (PACIS’20). [doi] [pdf]
S. Wijenayake, D. Hettiachchi, S. Hosio, V. Kostakos, J. Goncalves (2020). Effect of Conformity on Perceived Trustworthiness of News in Social Media. IEEE Internet Computing. [doi] [pdf]
D. Hettiachchi, N. van Berkel, S. Hosio, V. Kostakos, J. Goncalves (2019). Effect of Cognitive Abilities on Crowdsourcing Task Performance. Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT’19). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11746. Springer, Cham. [doi] [pdf]
D. Hettiachchi, J. Goncalves (2019). Towards Effective Crowd-Powered Online Content Moderation. In Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (OzCHI '19). ACM. [doi] [pdf]
D. Hettiachchi, N. van Berkel, T. Dingler, F. Allison, V. Kostakos, J. Goncalves (2019). Enabling Creative Crowd Work through Smart Speakers. In International Workshop on Designing Crowd-powered Creativity Support Systems (CHI’19 Workshop), 1-5. [doi] [pdf]
Z. Sarsenbayeva, N. van Berkel, D. Hettiachchi, W. Jiang, T. Dingler, E. Velloso, V. Kostakos, J. Goncalves (2019). Measuring the Effects of Stress on Mobile Interaction. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 3(1), 24:1-24:18. [doi] [pdf]
N. van Berkel, J. Goncalves , D. Hettiachchi, S. Wijenayake, R. M. Kelly, V. Kostakos (2019). Crowdsourcing Perceptions of Fair Predictors for Machine Learning: A Recidivism Case Study. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3 (CSCW), 28:1-28:21.[doi] [pdf] [code]
Z. Sarsenbayeva, N. van Berkel, W. Jiang, D. Hettiachchi, V. Kostakos, J. Goncalves (2019). Effect of Ambient Light on Mobile Interaction. Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT’19). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11748. Springer, Cham. [doi] [pdf]
Eranjith, H. M. D., Fernando, I. D., Fernando, G. K. S., Soysa, W. C. M., Jayasena, V. S. D. (2016). A visualization and analysis platform for performance tuning. In 2016 Moratuwa Engineering Research Conference (MERCon) (pp. 72–77). [doi] [pdf]
I am available for research supervision including short term research projects. Please contact me at danula.hettiachchi[at]rmit.edu.au if you are interested in working with me.
My wife, Maneesha is also pursuing a PhD in Time Series Forecasting at The University of Melbourne and IBM Research Australia.
When I am not in front of my computer, I enjoy hiking, running, board games and good food.
My longest run so far!