Chanuka Algama

Chanuka is a PhD student and Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Computer Science at Tulane University, advised by Professor Carola Wenk. His research focuses on spatiotemporal machine learning, interpretable anomaly detection, and geospatial AI, supported by the IARPA HAYSTAC program.

He developed LIAD, a lightweight framework for explaining anomalies in individual movement trajectories, and Agentic-LIAD, an LLM-based evidence-adjudication and reranking extension. His work includes scalable Python pipelines for more than 14 million trajectory records. Two of his papers have been accepted at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026, including the PhD and Graduate Studies Workshop.

Previously, he worked with the Data, Algorithms and Policy team at LIRNEasia (2023–2025), applying machine learning, remote sensing, and spatial modeling to poverty mapping, urbanization, and energy research in Sri Lanka.

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profile photo

Research

My research focuses on interpretable mobility anomaly detection, spatiotemporal machine learning, optical flow, and machine learning for public policy. Some papers are highlighted.

LIAD: Lightweight Interpretable Mobility Anomaly Detection via Agent-Adaptive Behavioral Deviations
Chanuka Algama, Erfan Hosseini Sereshgi, and Carola Wenk
ACM SIGSPATIAL, 2026 · Accepted

A lightweight framework combining Temporal Signature Matching for weekly behavioral changes with an Origin-Return Encoder for trip-level deviations. Explanations capture changes in travel distance, speed, dwell time, destination choice, visited locations, and route structure.

Drift or Deviation? Continual Detection of Anomalies Amid Changing Patterns of Life
Chanuka Algama
ACM SIGSPATIAL PhD and Graduate Studies Workshop, Graduate Student Research Competition, 2026 · Accepted
Optical-flow research visualization
Optical-flow illustration
Robust Optical Flow Computation: A Higher-Order Differential Approach
Chanuka Algama and Kasun Amarasinghe
VISAPP, 2026, Vol. 3, pp. 373–380 · Published and presented

A higher-order differential optical-flow method using a second-order Taylor formulation, perturbation-based correction, and Horn–Schunck regularization, evaluated on KITTI and Middlebury benchmarks.

Poverty-mapping research visualization
Poverty-mapping output
Informing Public Policy with Machine Learning: Mapping Poverty in Sri Lanka Using Mobile Call Detail Records and Remote Sensing Data
Chanuka Algama, Merl Chandana, Viren Dias, and Kasun Amarasinghe
AAAI 2025 AI for Public Missions Workshop, 2025 · Published and presented

Pinpointing where poverty is most severe and tracking its changes over time is crucial for facilitating and monitoring the effects of poverty alleviation initiatives. However, traditional benchmarks like household surveys and national censuses often fall short—they’re expensive, resource-intensive, infrequent, and incapable of reflecting the full spectrum of household well-being. They often fail to account for geographic variation in cost of living, medical needs, or the costs of earning income. This gap is particularly pronounced in contexts like Sri Lanka, leading to a reliance on obsolete information when responding to economic shocks or disasters. On top of that, poverty cannot be determined by income data alone; rather, it’s multidimensional, where factors such as infrastructure, access to services, and economic activity also play a role in determining the well-being of a community

Urban-mapping research visualization
Urban-mapping output
Using Medium Resolution Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning to Redefine Urban Areas in Sri Lanka

This research introduced an end-to-end open-source pipeline to predict the Built-up (Bu) and Non-Built-up (NBU) areas using satellite band data. Finally, the project provides the code base for implementing the UN- Habitat definition What is a City, to understand the patterns, trends, and boundaries of urbanization.

Conversational RAG web application
Conversational RAG with Memory-Based Context Enhancement

Primary Focus: RAG(Retrieval augmented generation) faces limitations in capturing context and understanding complex queries as the proximity of text chunks in the embedding space does not guarantee a meaningful question-and-answer pair.

Colombo night skyline
Neural style-transfer output
When Deep Learning Meets Van Gogh

This works by using a deep neural network to take two images—a content image and a feature image—and blend them together so that the output image looks like the content image but "painted" in the style of the style image. VGG-19, a 19-layer CNN trained on the ImageNet dataset, is utilized here. Since this implementation doesn't require training or fully connected layers, the trainable parameters are set to False. To obtain a multi-level representation of the style image, feature correlations are calculated between different feature maps. The content loss between the content image and the output image is computed using the mean squared error (MSE) of localized shapes. However, for the style image, calculating loss through MSE is less effective, as the goal is to mimic the color and texture in the output image. Therefore, the Gram matrix is used to capture a more general representation of the style image.

Education & Experience

Tulane University · PhD in Computer Science, August 2025–present.
Graduate Research Assistant, 2025–present. Advisor: Professor Carola Wenk.

University of Kelaniya · BSc (Hons) in Computer Science, First-Class Honours.
GPA: 3.73/4.00. Minor: Pure Mathematics.

LIRNEasia · Researcher (2024–2025), Junior Researcher (2023–2024), Data Science Intern (2023).

Technical Skills

Python, MATLAB, NumPy, pandas, GeoPandas, PyTorch, scikit-learn, Git, and Linux. Experience in unsupervised anomaly detection, Deep SVDD, interpretable ML, trajectory analysis, remote sensing, spatial econometrics, Bayesian geostatistical modeling, and large-scale reproducible research pipelines.

Awards

Second Prize, IEEE SA P2834 Student Challenge · Valencia, Spain, 2022.
Developed ConvAuther, a conversational-AI system for multifactor authentication.

Dean’s List, University of Kelaniya, Faculty of Science · 2017/2018 and 2018/2019.


© Chanuka Algama 2026