Danula Hettiachchi

Melbourne · Australia · contact [at] danulahettiachchi.com

I am a Lecturer at 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 Causal Academic 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.

Publications

2023

D. Hettiachchi, K. Ji, J. Kennedy, A. McCosker, F. Salim, M. Sanderson, F. Scholer, D. Spina (2023). Designing and Evaluating Presentation Strategies for Fact-Checked Content. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'23) (pp. 751-761). [doi] [pdf-acm] [pdf] [code]

D. Hettiachchi, I. Holcombe-James, S. Livingstone, A. de Silva, M. Lease, F. Salim, M. Sanderson (2023). How Crowd Worker Factors Influence Subjective Annotations: A Study of Tagging Misogynistic Hate Speech in Tweets. In Proceedings of the 11th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP’23). 38-50. [doi] [pdf]

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) (pp. 255-264). [doi] [pdf] [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) (pp. 1971–1975). [doi] [pdf-acm] [pdf] [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). [pdf] [talk] [arxiv]

K. Ji, D. Spina, D. Hettiachchi, F. Salim, F. Scholer (2023). Towards Detecting Tonic Information Processing Activities with Physiological Data. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and the 2023 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp/ISWC '23 Adjunct), to appear.

2022

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]

2021

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]

2020

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]

2019

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]

2016

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]

Experience

Lecturer,
RMIT University

Working at the School of Computing Technologies.

November 2023 - Present
Research Fellow,
RMIT University

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.

March 2021 - November 2023
Applied Scientist Intern,
Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Working with Amazon GroundTruth, MTurk and Augmented AI (A2I) team. Mentored by Associate Prof. Matthew Lease

June 2020 - November 2020
Casual Academic,
The University of Melbourne

Work as a tutor at School of Computing & Information Systems, Melbourne School of Engineering.

July 2018 - June 2020
Manager - User Experience Lab,
The University of Melbourne

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.

July 2018 - February 2020
Software Engineer,
Sysco Labs

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.

April 2016 - February 2018
Visiting​ ​Instructor,
University of Moratuwa

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering.

April 2015 - February 2016
Google​ ​Summer​ ​of​ ​Code​ ​Intern,
WSO2

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.

May 2015 - September 2015
Software Engineering Intern,
WSO2

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.

October 2014 - April 2015

Education

University of Melbourne

PhD in Engineering and IT
Thesis - Task Assignment using Worker Cognitive Ability and Context to Improve Data Quality in Crowdsourcing

Supervised by Dr. Jorge Goncalves and Prof. Vassilis Kostakos at School of Computing and Information Systems.

February 2018 - February 2021

University of Moratuwa

B.Sc. (Hons) in Engineering

First Class. Specialized in Computer Science and Engineering

October 2011 - April 2016

Royal College, Colombo

Secondary Education
January 2002 - August 2010

Supervision

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.

Supervision - PhD
  • Kaixin Ji (2022 - ongoing, co-supervisor), RMIT University.
  • Hmdh Alknjr (2022 - ongoing, co-supervisor), RMIT University.
  • Hiruni Kegalle (2021 - ongoing, co-supervisor), RMIT University.
Supervision - MSc/MIT/BSc Thesis
  • Kanika Mehra (BSc Hons, 2022, co-supervisor), RMIT University.
  • Tanay Arora (MIT, 2020, co-supervisor), Dongdong Yu (MIT, 2020, co-supervisor), Leonardus Elbert Putra (MIT, 2019, co-supervisor), Yue Wang (MIT, 2019, co-supervisor), Yangyang HE (MSc, 2019, co-supervisor), Kening Wu (MIT, 2018, co-supervisor), The University of Melbourne.

Teaching

RMIT University
  • Lecturer - User Centred Design (COSC 2628, 2023) and Usability Engineering (COSC 1182/1183, 2022).
The University of Melbourne
  • Tutor for Machine Learning (COMP 30027), Social Computing (INFO 90007), Knowledge Technologies (COMP 90049) and Fundamentals of Interaction Design (INFO 10003).
  • Teaching Support for Evaluating the User Experience (INFO 90004), Usability Engineering (INFO 30004), Usability Evaluation Methods (INFO 20004).
  • Completed several teaching training programmes including Melbourne Teaching Certificate for Graduate Researchers, Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne, 2019
University of Moratuwa
  • Teaching Assistant for Database Systems (CS 3042) and Presentation Skills (CS 2963)

Academic Services

  • Associate Chair at CHI 2022, 2023, 2024.
  • Programme Committee Member at conferences including WSDM 2022, 2023, WWW 2022, 2023, CIKM 2022, 2023, HCOMP 2020, 2023.
  • Reviewer for CHI, CSCW, WWW, SIGKDD, IMWUT, IP&M and TOIS.
  • Technical Programme Committee Member (Data Chair) at CHI 2019.
  • Website Co-chair at HCOMP 2022.
  • Organizer for workshops at CHI 2022 and CSCW 2019.
  • Student Volunteer at CHI 2019, OzCHI 2018.
  • Student Volunteer Chair at CHI Down Under 2020.

Awards

  • Best Paper Award, CIS Doctoral Colloquium, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, 2018
  • Intrapreneur Award, Sysco Labs, 2017
  • Dean’s List, Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, 2011-2016 (Semester 1,7 and 8)
  • Runners up, Hall of Fame for Engineering Excellence, Sysco Labs, 2016
  • Process and Quality Compliance Award, Sysco Labs, 2016
  • Inclusive Student Leader, Unilever Youth Forum, Sri Lanka, 2015
  • Cecil Perera Memorial Scholarship for academic excellence, 162nd Prize Giving, Royal College, Colombo, 2010. (received 9 awards at Royal College Prize Givings, 2002-2010)
  • Sri Lanka Mathematics Olympiad, High Distinction, 2008, 2009 and 2010

Scholarships
  • Google Travel Scholarship, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Australia, 2019.
  • Melbourne Research Scholarship for graduate studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. 2018-2021.
  • Mahapola Higher Education (Merit) Scholarship for undergraduate studies at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Sponsor: University Grants Commission (UGC) of Sri Lanka, 2011-2015.
  • Eagle Higher Education scholarship for secondary education and undergraduate studies. Awarded for obtaining highest marks in Puttalam District in Grade Five Scholarship Examination, 2007-2016.

Competitions
  • Spiralation Hackathon - Runners up, World Conference on Youth, 2014
  • Ranked 52nd globally, IEEEXtreme 7.0 programming competition, 2013
  • Ranked 57th globally, Bitwise 2013 programming competition, 2013
  • Ranked 93rd globally, IEEEXtreme 6.0 programming competition, 2012

Volunteering and Leadership

About Me

My wife, Dr Maneesha is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and a co-founder of Solstice AI. Her main research area is Time Series Forecasting.

When I am not in front of my computer, I enjoy hiking, running, board games and good food.