Dr. Danula Hettiachchi
Details
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Department: School of Computing Technologies
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Campus: City Campus Australia
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danula.hettiachchi@rmit.edu.au
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ORCID:
0000-0003-3875-5727
Open to
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
- Collaborative projects
- Media enquiries
- Industry Projects
About
Dr Hettiachchi is a Lecturer at the School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S), where he was previously a Research Fellow. His key research interests are crowdsourcing, social computing, responsible AI, and human-computer interaction. Dr Hettiachchi researches user interactions with automated decision-making systems and explores how biases manifest, influencing future system decisions and user perceptions. He obtained his PhD from the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and his thesis examined data quality in crowdsourcing.
Dr Hettiachchi has published his research in flagship venues of human-computer interaction (CHI), social computing (CSCW), and crowdsourcing (HCOMP). He has received several grants, including the DAAD AInet Fellowship in Human-Centred AI, an Early Career Research Grant from ADM+S, the Google Travel Scholarship and the Melbourne Research Scholarship. He has over seven years of teaching experience as a lecturer and tutor at three universities in Australia and Sri Lanka. Dr Hettiachchi actively collaborates and engages with the international research community and has served in numerous conference organising and program committees.
Professional interests:
- Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).
- Associate Chair at CHI 2022-2025.
- Program Committee member for conferences, including The Web Conference, WSDM, SIGIR, CIKM, and HCOMP.
- Reviewer for esteemed journals, including PACMHCI(CSCW), IMWUT, IP&M, and TOIS.
- Organising Committee member for international conferences, including CHI 2019, HCOMP 2022, and MobileHCI 2024.
Industry experience:
Dr Hettiachchi has worked as a Full-Stack Software Engineer at Sysco Labs, primarily focused on data engineering and analytics. During his PhD, he worked as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon (AWS), United States.
Media
Research fields
- 460803 Collaborative and social computing
- 460806 Human-computer interaction
- 460805 Fairness, accountability, transparency, trust and ethics of computer systems
Academic positions
- Lecturer
- RMIT University
- School of Computing Technologies
- Melbourne, Australia
- Nov 2023 – Present
- Research Fellow
- RMIT University
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S)
- Melbourne, Australia
- Mar 2021 – Nov 2023
Non-academic positions
- Applied Scientist Intern
- Amazon (United States)
- Seattle, United States
- Jun 2020 – Nov 2020
- Software Engineer
- Sysco Labs
- , Sri Lanka
- Apr 2016 – Feb 2018
Degrees
- Ph.D, Computer Science
- University of Melbourne
- Australia
- 2018 – 2021
Supervisor projects
- How Users Judge the Credibility of Answers Shown in Community Question Answering Services
- 26 Apr 2022
- Quantify and Measure Confirmation Bias in Information Retrieval
- 9 Mar 2022
- Systems for Automated Decision-Making
- 25 Jan 2022
Teaching interests
Dr Hettiachchi has over seven years of experience teaching in the higher education sector. In 2025, he is teaching Usability Engineering and Programming Studio.
