Kanchana Thilakarathna

Dr. Kanchana Thilakarathna is a Senior Lecturer in Distributed Computing at the University of Sydney's School of Computer Science, and a member of the Centre for Distributed and High Performance Computing. They hold a PhD from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and a B.Sc. Eng (Hons) from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Prior to academia, they worked as a Research Scientist at CSIRO/Data61 and had industry experience as a Mobile Radio Network Engineer.

Research Interests: Dr. Thilakarathna focuses on cybersecurity, privacy in mobile and IoT systems, mixed reality privacy, and distributed computing platforms. Their work emphasizes user-centric solutions like the Yalut social media app, which enables decentralized data sharing. Key themes include privacy-preserving techniques, edge computing, and secure federated learning frameworks.

Recent Work: Recent articles (2023–2025) explore machine unlearning for large language models, federated learning security, and IoT network slicing using P4 programmability. Their work on synthetic video traffic generation (VideoTrain++) and drone detection (DronePrint) demonstrates cross-disciplinary innovation.

• Awards: Malcolm Chaikin Prize (2015), Meta Research Awards (2020/2022), and Heidelberg Laureate Fellowship (2019).
• Grants: ARC Research Hub for Future Digital Manufacturing (2024), NSW Defence Innovation Network Projects (2024/2021), and Facebook Research Awards (2022/2020).
• Students: Advising 4 current PhD students on topics like wireless trust establishment and machine unlearning.
• Labs/Teams: Part of the Centre for Distributed and High Performance Computing and Sydney Nano Institute.