Akila de Silva

About Me

I am an assistant professor in computer science at San Francisco State University. 

I received my PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from UC Santa Cruz, where I was advised by Professor Alex Pang and co-advised by Professor James Davis. I received my MS degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.

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I am always eager to welcome motivated students to join my research lab. If you are interested in exploring opportunities, please don't hesitate to reach out via email.

current email : desilva@sfsu.edu

previously used emails : akila.desilva@ucsc.edu | akila.desilva@columbia.edu


Grants and Awards

AI FAST Challenge, 2025-2026 

E-GAISE: Ethical Generative AI in Undergraduate Computer Science Education


PI: Shahrukh Humayoun, Co-PI: Hui Yang, Co-PI: Isabel Hyo Jung Song, Co-PI: Akila de Silva

Michael Richman Award, 2024-2025 

Rebuild the Social Fabrics of San Francisco with Vision Pro

PI: Leigh Jin  Co-PI: Akila de Silva Co-PI Weimin Zhang


Selected Publications

WIP: Citizen Science Tools with Machine Learning as a Pathway to Engage High School Students in Research

Accepted at Frontiers in Education, 2024

Fahim Hasan Khan, Emily Lovell, Akila de Silva, Gregory Dusek, James Davis, Alex Pang

VortexViz: Finding Vortices by Learning from Particle Trajectories.

Under Review, 2024, ArXiv link

Akila de Silva, Nicholas Tee, Omkar Ghanakar, Fahim Hasan Khan, Gregory Dusek, James Davis, Alex Pang

SmartCS: Enabling the creation of ML-Powered Computer Vision Mobile Apps for Citizen Science Applications without Coding.

Citizen Science : Theory and Practice, 2024, Published Paper 

Acceptance rate : 46%

Fahim Hasan Khan, Akila de Silva, Gregory Dusek, James Davis, Alex Pang

Expanding partnerships, products and use-cases for an operational coastal web camera observation network

Ocean Sciences Meeting, 2024, link 

Gregory Dusek, Debra Hernandez, Joseph Long, Dwayne Porter, Alex Pang, Jeremy Cothran, Louisa Schandera, Lauren Showalter, Josh Rhoades, Chris Sager, Margaret L. Palmsten, Akila de Silva, Fahim Khan and Theo Jass

RipViz: Finding Rip Currents by Learning Pathline Behavior.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2023: Published Paper, Supp. Materials 

Acceptance rate : ~18-24%

Akila de Silva, Mona Zhao, Donald Stewart, Fahim Hasan Khan, Gregory Dusek, James Davis, Alex Pang

How much does input data type impact final face model accuracy?

IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022: Published Article  

Acceptance rate : 25.33%

Jiahao Luo, Fahim Khan, Issei Mori, Akila de Silva, Eric Sandoval Ruezga, Minghao Liu, Alex Pang,  James Davis

Flow-based Rip Current Detection and Visualization.

IEEE Access, 2022: Published Article 

Acceptance rate : 30%

Issei Mori, Akila de Silva,  Gregory Dusek, James Davis, Alex Pang

Rip Current Detection from Region Based Convolutional Neural Networks.

Coastal Engineering, 2021: Video, Preprint, Published Journal Article, Data, BibTeX   

Acceptance rate : 27%

Akila de Silva, Issei Mori, Gregory Dusek, James Davis, Alex Pang

Authoring Platform for Mobile Citizen Science Apps with Client-side ML

CSCW Poster, 2021 : Poster, Published Paper 

Acceptance rate : ~ 60-70%

Fahim Hasan Khan, Akila de Silva, Gregory Dusek, James Davis, Alex Pang

Face Models: How Good Does My Data Need To Be?.

IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2021: Published Paper 

Acceptance rate : 46%

Jiahao Luo, Fahim Hasan Khan, Issei Mori, Akila de Silva, Eric Sandoval Ruezga, James Davis

From Lifeguards to AI: Advancing Rip Current Forecasting Through New Detection Methods.

Ocean Sciences Meeting, 2020: Poster link, Poster

Gregory Dusek, Michael Churma, Jung-Sun Im, Alex Pang, Akila de Silva, Issei Mori

Sequential Image Synthesis for Human Activity Video Generation.

International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, 2019:  Published Paper

Acceptance rate : 59%  

Fahim Hasan Khan*, Akila de Silva*, Jayanth Yetukuri*, Narges Norouzi*

* equal contribution


Service

Reviewer for IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS) Short Papers, 2024

Reviewer for The Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, 2024

Reviewer for Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis), 2024

Program Committee VDS symposium at IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), 2023

Associate Chair for the ACM CSCW posters cycle, 2023

Reviewer for VizSec at IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), 2023

Reviewer for IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), 2023

Reviewer for IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A), 2023

Reviewer for IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023

Reviewer for The China Visualization and Visual Analytics Conference (ChinaVis), 2023

Reviewer for Remote Sensing, 2022