Harin Sellahewa

Dr Harin Sellahewa holds a BSc in Information Systems and a DPhil in Computing, both from the University of Buckingham. During the latter stages of his DPhil, he worked as a Research Associate on the EU-funded FP6 project, SecurePhone, led by Professor Sabah Jassim. He then joined the Gray Cancer Institute (now the Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology & Biology, University of Oxford), as a post-doctoral scientist to work with Professor Boris Vojnovic on the award winning CyMap project. Harin’s role was to develop algorithms to automatically detect, count and track cells.

He rejoined Buckingham in 2008 as a researcher, became a Senior Lecturer in July 2012 and a Reader in January 2018. He was appointed Head of Applied Computing Department (in School of Science) in November 2014, Interim Dean of School of Computing from 1st September 2018, and Dean of Computing from 1st September 2019. Since joining Buckingham, Harin has held the roles of Programme Director, Admissions Tutor, Research Officer and Link Tutor.

Harin’s research interests are in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning. He has co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed journal/conference papers and a book chapter. He has successfully supervised/co-supervised over a dozen PhD projects and continues to supervise a number of PhD projects in AI, Biometrics, Digital Health, and Cyber Security. He is the module lead for Image Processing, Software Project Management, and Software Engineering.

Harin was the Lead Academic of a successfully completed two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project, jointly funded by Innovate UK and Deepnet Security Limited. He is the Lead Academic of the recently awarded KTP project, jointly funded by Innovate UK and Russell IPM. More recently, he has expanded his work into augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) with a particular interest in their use in education. He is leading the Education 4.0 project in partnership with JISC, and spearheaded by Sir Anthony Seldon.

Harin is a passionate promotor of STEM; he has spoken at schools, science forums and public engagement events; organised and participated in several STEM activities (coding tasters, AR and VR experiences); and launched a campaign to increase diversity in Computing.