Vindula Jayawardana

vindula [AT] mit [DOT] edu

I am a PhD student in computer science at MIT. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Cathy Wu in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) and Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). Earlier, I completed my bachelors at University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka. I have also spent time doing research at NVIDIA and Toyota North America, and software engineering at WSO2, PickMe, and Trancite24.

Before graduate school, I was a part of Mobility, Algorithms, and Society Lab at Cornell University and Data Science, Engineering & Analytics Research Hub of University of Moratuwa.

I am broadly interested in learning-enabled autonomy, with my work spanning three main areas: (1) modeling and simulation of large-scale cyberphysical systems, (2) making learning generalize across diverse problem variations, and (3) real-world applications, particularly in autonomous driving. In light of this, first, I leverage efficient generative models and simulation techniques to build and calibrate large-scale mulit-agent traffic systems reflecting real world conditions. Second, I’ve developed residual reinforcement learning methods for generalizable multi-agent control. Third, I've worked on leveraging learning to control multi-agent fleets of cooperative autonomous vehicles to reduce metropolitan carbon emissions at scale. Before graduate school, I have also worked on mathematical programming for combinatorial optimizations and natural language processing for information extraction. I also lead the project Greenwave.

Resume  |  Google Scholar  |  LinkedIn  |  Github  |  Blog