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.
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