My ScholarX experience so far

Hello Everyone,

Today, I will share my experience on ScholarX, a 6-month free premium mentoring program for Sri-Lankan undergraduates. The program is organized by Sustainable Education Foundation(SEF) and I would like to express my gratitude to them for giving me this valuable opportunity to be mentored under Dr. Anupiya Nugaliyadde, who’s currently working as a Machine Learning Principle at Icetana.

What is ScholarX?

As I already mentioned ScholarX is a 6-month mentoring program organized by Sustainable Education Foundation for Sri-Lankan undergraduates. Successful undergraduates will have the opportunity to be mentored by some of the world’s leading experts and remarkable talent in both industry and academia. The ScholarX initiative also connects Sri Lankans all over the world and provides a platform for people living overseas to actively support students and the education system in Sri Lanka. The goal is to restore a steady flow of knowledge into Sri Lanka, filling some of the gaps left by the country’s brain drain.

My Mentor: Dr. Anupiya Nugaliyadde

My assigned mentor is Dr. Anupiya Nugaliyadde. Anupiya graduated with a PhD from Murdoch University in 2020. His thesis was Enhancing Natural Language Understanding using Meaning Representation and Deep Learning. He is the Australian Computer Society(ACS) WA 1962 Medalist for the Most outstanding PhD for the year 2020. His Long Term Memory Network (LTM) model was presented in the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, and his work is now being used in a Natural Language Processing Toolkit (KotlinNLP). His outstanding PhD work earned him a position as a postdoctoral research fellow at Murdoch University, where he collaborated with PathWest on a government-funded translation program. In addition, he is currently working as a Machine Learning Principal at Icetana.

My first meeting with the mentor

My mentor initially contacted me via email, in which he introduced himself to me. After setting up a time & date for the first gathering, we met via Google meet. In this initial meeting, we got to know a lot about each other and we were able to share our stories so far. We discussed how to get into the research field in Machine learning as well as current industry expectations of ML. He explained to me the importance of being updated with the latest inventions and research as well as he gave me some valuable insights to set up a better goal to work on.

How I plan to Improve further

The best thing I got from our first meeting is that my mentor helped me to identify my weaknesses and strengths. I’m determined to overcome those identified weaknesses and improve the strengths. I already started reading the latest research papers as well as I started to discover more things about the current industry trends. With this plan & continuous mentoring, I believe I’ll be able to get the most out of this opportunity I got.

My feeling about ScholarX so far

For me, being drawn to AI and Machine Learning was both interesting and restful. Even though Machine learning is filled with excitement, there are not many experts in this field from whom we can get insights in order to fulfil our career and educational goals. ScholarX gave me that exact opportunity. Even the first meeting with my mentor was such an eye-opener for me and I believe this will benefit me immensely in future in achieving my goals. For that, I would like to express my gratitude again to Sustainable Education Foundation(SEF) for giving me this invaluable opportunity. Lastly, I would like to invite every undergraduate who reads this article to be part of this amazing program at some point in your university life.

Thank you

-Pasan Devin Jayawardene-