Professor Varuna De Silva

Varuna De Silva is a Professor of AI and Digital Technologies. In 2016, he assumed duties as a lecturer in digital engineering at Loughborough University, where he was promoted to a Senior Lecturer in Jan 2020 and to Reader in 2023. He was the founder and programme director for MSc in AI and Data analytics. He is the recipient of three UKRI awards, including 2 as the Principal Investigator, in the area of next generation machine intelligence, and complementary industrial funding. As an independent principal investigator his research has attracted £1Mn of funding from UKRI and with colleagues attached to a funding portfolio of in excess of £2Mn. He has actively collaborated with industrial partners Chelsea Football Club, Dallas Mavericks (USA/NBA) and Toyota Manufacturing UK. The research attached to MIMIc Project, which was supported by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research council (Grant Number: EP/T000783/1), led to subsequent incorporation Game-Intuit Ltd, which is Loughborough University’s first spin-out around AI in team sports analysis. 

Since 2013, Varuna joined Apical Ltd, Now Part of ARM PLC, where he worked as a new algorithms developer for imaging and display systems to be run on efficient hardware platforms. The algorithms he developed were realized in nearly 500 million devices around the globe, and a patented technology for CMOS cameras, for which he is the lead inventor which appeared in nearly 90% of CCTV cameras in the world. 

Professor De Silva is the inaugural Thematic Research Lead in AI and digital technologies for the UK Parliament. As part of this lead advisory role in the parliament he advises select committees, and supports research staff with specialist knowledge in AI and digital technologies across various policy issues. On a routine basis he provides expert deep technical advise to parliamentary select committees, which includes science innovation and technology committee, Digital communications and media committee and Joint Committee on Human Rights. He has contributed to landmark public inquiries related to social media algorithms, phone theft inquiry, human rights and AI and emerging landscape of copyrights and AI. 

He currently leads the Machine Intelligence Lab at Loughborough University and is the supervisor of 8 researchers at post doctoral and doctoral level, and have graduated 8 PhD students as the supervisor. His team works on Engineering applications of Artificial Intelligence, specifically Multi-Agent learning, and multimodal machine learning, with a vision to scale state-of-the-art AI algorithms to real world Engineering systems. 

Varuna obtained his Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering from University of Surrey in 2011, after his first degree in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka. As a Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Varuna worked as a work package leader of a Large-Scale Integrated Projects "ROMEO", and “BATS” funded by the European Commission. In 2011 Varuna was awarded the “Chester Sall Award” from the IEEE consumer electronic society award, and Vice-chancellor's best Post-Graduate Research student at University of Surrey. 

Academic Qualifications

10/2008 – 10/2011: Ph.D., Electronic Engineering, Center for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey, Guildford, Thesis: Improving Perceptual quality of 3DTV systems.

05/2003 – 09/2007: B.Sc. (Honors), Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka ,  First Class Honors, GPA 3.96, specialisation in Electronic and Telecommunications engineering, top 1%. Premier state-funded Engineering University of Sri Lanka.

10/2016 – 4/2018: Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP), Loughborough University

Academic Affiliations

• Member, UKRI Talent Peer Review College (2023–present).
• Associate Editor, IEEE Access;
• Member of the IET (MIET), British Computer Society (MBCS), IEEE and INSTICC.
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
• Long-standing membership of programme and technical committees for major IEEE and international conferences in image processing, pattern recognition and AI.

Varuna’s independent programme of research has been funded by research councils of the UK.

Selected research grant awards:

09/2024 – 09/2026: Thematic Research Lead - UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) fellowship – ES/Z00036X/1, Investigators –V. De Silva (PI), Value for V. De Silva, LU (£250,000) - To facilitate and enhance the use of research evidence and expertise in Parliament (in both the House of Commons and House of Lords) across a broad policy area, through effective knowledge exchange and collaboration. This is a 0.6FTE fellowship for two years starting September 2024.

09/2025 – 04/2026: Electromagnetic Neural Networks for Over-the-air Communication, Sensing and Computing – CHEDDAR Communications Hub, new partner project, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant numbers EP/X040518/1 and EP/Y037421/1. Investigators – Marco Di Renzo (King's College London), Varuna De Silva (LU), and Haris Pervez (University of Essex). Value - £100,000

01/2023 – 01/2026: ATRACT: A Trustworthy Robotic Autonomous system to support Casualty Triage, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) - EP/X028631/1 Investigators – A. Behera (PI), V. De Silva (Lougborough-PI), P. Lee, and K. Saeed,  Value - £849,000, Value for V. De Silva, LU (£340,000), To develop a fleet of autonomous drones for data capturing and triaging of casualties on a contested battlefield to help medics on ground. VDS responsibilities include multi-agent drone system control under different resource constraints, and multimodal data fusion for casualty triaging.

12/2019 –  12/2022: MIMic: Multimodal Imitation Learning in Multi-Agent Environments, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) - EP/T000783/1, Investigators – V. De Silva (PI), New Investigator Award, Value - £258,875 + In-kind support from Chelsea F.C. - Investigating new directions of data-driven learning real-world multi-agent environments. The algorithms include both imitation learning and reinforcement learning algorithms with an application to driverless vehicle control and decision-making of humans in team environments.

06/2019 –  05/2020: Integration of AI to support decision making related to team performance, Dallas Mavericks NBA Team USA – Commercial Innovation Funding, Investigators – V. De Silva (PI), Mike Caine, Value - £72,000 - Developed a methodology for the extraction of multi-person 3D body pose from video footage. This work involved the development of a new deep learning-based solution for video analysis and utilizing the body pose for understanding how players use their body to defend 3 point shots in basketball.

10/2018 –  10/2022: Intuitive Learning: National Productivity Investment Fund, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) - EP/S515140/1, Ph.D. Supervisor – V. De Silva, Student: Haileleol Tibebu, Value - £89,761 + In-kind support from PTV Group, UK  - Investigated the new multimodal algorithms for scene perception and localisation of driverless vehicles.

Post graduate research supervision

Completed Graduations:

10/2016 –  01/2020, Principal Supervisor of Dr. Jamie Roche, now a lecturer at ITSligo – Ireland, Thesis: Multimodal Machine Learning for Intelligent Mobility

10/2018 –  01/2023, Principal Supervisor of Dr. Haylat Tibebu, now Assistant Professor at University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign. Thesis: Multimodal Scene Representations for Localisation of Driverless Vehicles

10/2018 –  08/2023, Co-Supervisor of Ph.D. Student Mr. Eyad Alsaghir, Now teaching fellow, Loughborough University. Thesis: Understanding the learnt representations in deep neural networks

10/2020 – 09/2023, Principal Supervisor – Dr. Rafael Moreira Pina, Post doctoral research fellow, Loughborough University, Title of Research: Scaling Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL).

01/2020 - 06/2024, Co-Supervisor – Dr. Haoyang Qin, Now Anniversary Research Fellow – Queen's University Belfast, UK. Title of Research: Hyper-resolution urban flood modelling.

10/2020 -06/2024, Principal Supervisor – Dr. Aaron Gu, Now Chief Executive Officer of Game-Intuit Ltd, UK. Title of Research: Multi-agent Imitation learning for football skill quantification.

10/2021 -11/2024, Principal Supervisor – Dr. Corentin Artaud, now Robotics Software Engineer · Icarus Robotics, USA. Title of Research: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL).

04/2020 – 05/2025, Principal Supervisor – Dr. Jamie Na, now Chief Technology Officer – Game-Intuit Ltd, UK. Title of Research: 3-Dimensional Multi-person Body Pose Estimation

Current Doctoral Students:

Ms. Misbah Farooq, Research: Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Mr. Yuen Kun, Research: Integrating Reinforcement Learning through Brain Computer Interfaces

Mr. Charuka Herath, Research: Privacy Preserving Machine Learning Techniques in Federated Learning

Ms. Mindula Illeperuma, Research: Neuro-psychological framing of Human AI Collaboration

Mr. Sharmarke Gabyre, Research: Neuromorphic algorithms for Cross Modal data fusion, and multi-agent systems

Mr Zihui Yan, Research: Wireless radar based multimodal sensing systems

Mr. Biyon Fernando, Research: Autonomous clothes for neuromorphic data capture

Ms. Hasini Siyambalagamuwa, Research: Neuromorphic wearables for medical applications

Mr Yasiru Senarath, Research: Wireless communications and novel wearables design

Selected Keynote Speeches/ Invited talks

Invited Speaker / Panelist, The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), “The Digital Teacher: AI in Education”

Keynote Speech, Autonomy Unleashed 2025, BattleLab, Dorset Innovation Park, “Simulating Success: The Power of Digital Twins”

Panelist: HereEast, “Future is now” Leadership Forum, “Debunking Myths around AI panel”

Keynote Speech: International Conference on Global Aeronautical Engineering and Satellite Technology 2024 (GAST'24) Morrocco, April 2024, “Advanced Applications of AI for drones control and computing”

Invited speaker, and Panelist: AI UK Fringe event, “START in AI: Safety, Trust, Acceptance, Responsibility & Transparency in AI”, University of Portsmouth, March 2024, “From Training Footballers to Robots: What START means to my team of AI Researchers”

Invited Panellist and Host: Responsible AI in the Military (REAIM 2023) @ The Hague, organised by Government of the Netherlands, February 2023, Panel Discussion on “Design and development of accountable and trustworthy artificial intelligence in military”

Keynote Speech: 3^rd IAPR International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Pattern Recognition (ISPR 2023) Tunisia, May 2023, “Autonomous Learning in Multi Agent Environments: Cooperation, Communication and scalability”

Invited Panellist: British Applied Mathematics Colloquium, April 2022, “Mathematics: Enabling Innovation in Sport”

Keynote speech: 2021 International conference on Advanced Computing and Intelligent Technologies, India, “Engineering Applications and Challenges of Reinforcement Learning”, 2021

Tutorial: ECAI 2020, European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, “Data Driven Policy Learning in Real World Multi-Agent Environments”, 2020

Public Lecture: New South Wales Chapter, Institution for Engineers Sri Lanka, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Engineering Applications”, 2021

Keynote speech: 5th IEEE International Conference on Information Technology Research, Sri Lanka, “An Engineering Perspective on Artificial Intelligence: Theory, Applications and the Future”, 2020

Advisory & Governance Roles

• Thematic Research Lead in AI and Digital Technologies (UK Parliament) (House of Commons / House of Lords, 2024–present)
• Strategic Advisory Board Member – Insight Genie (2025–present)
• Member, Data Ethics Advisory Board – London Borough of Hackney (2025–present)
• Advisor on Artificial Intelligence – Board of Trustees, Torjir-Agber Foundation (2024–present)
• Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer – Game Intuit (2024–present)

Policy & Expert Consultations

• Science, Innovation and Technology Committee (UK Parliament) – expert advisor on low-energy computing, silicon photonics and neuromorphic computing for an inquiry on future compute.
• Joint Committee on Human Rights (UK Parliament) – private briefing on human rights implications of frontier AI, including surveillance, algorithmic decision-making and accountability.
• House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee– private briefing on AI and copyright, risks of generative systems and possible mitigation mechanisms.
• Science, Innovation and Technology Committee: Phone Theft Inquiry– advice on technological approaches to reducing phone theft, including engagement with Apple, Samsung and Google.
• Home Affairs, Equality and Justice hub (UK Parliament) – expert training on AI in the criminal justice system and novel digital surveillance schemes.
• Google – Trust, Policy and Knowledge Exchange team– consultation on Agentic AI, focusing on development practices, opportunities and risks of autonomous AI agents.
• Treasury Committee (UK Parliament) – invited written brief on AI in financial services.
• British Academy and Skills England Roundtable (2024) – contributor to roadmap discussions on AI skills policy in the UK.
• Director – VINAI Data and Signal Processing Ltd (2019–present) - Provides consultancy and training in data science and AI to Barts Health National Health Service (NHS), Cambridge University Machine Learning Academy, Judge Business School, Cambridge, and AI Apprenticeships.

Industrial & Applied Collaborations

• Elite sport performance – collaborations with Chelsea FC Academy, Dallas Mavericks (NBA) and West Ham United on player-tracking analytics, spatial control metrics, pressure maps and decision-making under uncertainty.
• Autonomous systems and manufacturing – collaboration with Toyota Manufacturing UK on autonomous warehouse trucks and human–robot collaboration in logistics.
• Intelligent mobility and traffic – partnership with PTV Group (UK) on multimodal perception and intelligent mobility simulation, supporting an EPSRC PhD studentship.
• Digital twins– co-investigator on a UNESCO Chair in Multi-Hazard Risk Modelling, combining AI, multi-agent simulations and high-performance computing for urban flood resilience.

Media Engagements and Public Outreach

2025/05: BBC World at One – Live Radio – Expert discussion on AI and Ageing as related to an article appearing on The Lancet Digital Health journal.

2025/05: BBC Radio – Extra Time – Expert commentary on how AI is being used across sport now – and possible future applications.

2024: Winning with data - podcast, From Gemini Sports Analytics, June 2024

2024: Times Higher Education, “Embedded inside Parliament, influence of academics grows”, September 2024

2023: Bluecorp Techbytes Podcast, “Is AI for you & if AI is a panacea?”, June 2023

2022: Technical Mentor, D-Ford collaborative design challenge involving Masters students from Loughborough University and design team at Ford UK.

2020: BBC World Service, Digital Planet, “Bias in Artificial Intelligence”, Nov 2019, aired on New Year Day, 2020

2018: The Conversation, “Chelsea is using our AI research for smarter football coaching”, November 2018, subsequent republication on multiple global media outlets

2018: ITU News, “4 emerging technologies on display at the 2018 World Cup”, July 2018