Kavindu Ravishan Perera

Teaching machines to decide, answer, listen, help and earn trust.

Project Researcher at the University of Oulu. I build AI that policymakers, researchers and everyday people can actually use, and I study how people and AI work together.

Selected projects Get in touch
Now
Project Researcher, University of Oulu
Focus
Conversational AI, AI agents and human-AI interaction
Reinforcement learningScalable deploymentInterface designHuman computer interactionContext engineeringUser centred designForward deployed engineeringRetrieval augmented generation

One small change to an interface made people feel differently about the same product and I have been chasing that question ever since, from web design into HCI and now into AI.

Kavindu Ravishan Perera at his graduation from the University of Oulu, holding his degree certificate

I started out making people click.

It started with web development, design and digital marketing. I loved the work and it kept showing me how much the small details changed what people did.

To understand why, I went into human-centred design and HCI, and joined the Crowd Computing group at the University of Oulu.

Then I wanted to build the systems myself. At the FCG group I brought that human-centred thinking into agentic AI.

Now I work on NeuroClima, AIKAA and ARGENTIC, learning new technology in depth and using it on problems people actually have.

Mixed background. I think about users first because that is where I started. I also write the deployment configs.

Affiliations

The record.

Studied at

  • University of Oulu University of Oulu
  • Universität Greifswald Universität Greifswald
  • Riga Technical University Riga Technical University
  • SLTC SLTC

Worked at

  • University of Oulu University of Oulu

Collaborated with

  • University of Oulu University of Oulu
  • Aalborg University Aalborg University
  • University of Tokyo University of Tokyo

Brands I worked with

  • Nekosama Nekosama
  • Luxhomedeco Luxhomedeco
  • Hemphilia Hemphilia
  • Memoscrap Memoscrap

Research mentioned in

Selected projects

Research that had to survive being deployed, and products that had to survive being studied.

Climate reports with charts and a world map spread on a desk beside a laptop, a birch tree outside the window
EU Horizon project

NeuroClima

Climate and policy knowledge anyone can ask about, in four languages.
An open notebook of hand-drawn flow diagrams, some routes crossed out, with a pencil and a red sticky note
PhD research

ARGENTIC

Deciding where each AI workload should run, and learning to decide better.
A small team around a table watching a colleague point at sticky notes on a whiteboard
ESF+ project

AIKAA

Generative AI demos for the repetitive work in small Finnish companies.
A person speaking into a phone in a bright cafe, a red cup on the table behind
Master’s thesis

Voice to Value

Speak a review, and an AI helps you make it one you would post.
A Pepper robot standing by the windows of a university corridor as students walk past
Summer internship

Human robot interaction

What people would need before trusting a robot on campus.

 Index All projects

Publications

All publications

  1. ACM MUM 2024 First author 2024

    From Voice to Value: Leveraging AI to Enhance Spoken Online Reviews on the Go

    Speak a review, and let an AI help turn it into one you would post. Fourteen people, 157 reviews.

    (opens in a new tab)

  2. ACM OzCHI 2025 Co-author 2025

    Factors of Trust for Successfully Adopting Social Robots on the Campus

    What people would need before trusting a social robot on campus.

    (opens in a new tab)

  3. Manuscript First author In preparation

    A modular transformer framework for automated detection and structuring of social tipping point evidence in climate-related documents

    A modular transformer framework for finding the moments a public conversation turns, and structuring what it finds.

    (opens in a new tab)

  4. Manuscript First author In preparation

    What Does a Faithfulness Score Summarise? Evidence from a Production RAG System Built with Open-Source Technologies

    What an LLM judge’s faithfulness score actually rests on, read from its own explanations for 1,197 answers in a production RAG system.

  5. Manuscript Co-author In preparation

    AIRA Scholar-KG: A Multi-Source Knowledge Graph and Grounded Conversational Assistant for Academic Research Exploration

    Asking questions of the literature and getting answers grounded in a knowledge graph assembled from several sources, rather than a single index.

  6. Manuscript Co-author In preparation

    Log2Sign: Automatic signature generation using LLMs with Explainability and Interpretability

    Generating intrusion detection signatures with large language models, and keeping each one explainable.

Education

Full education

  1. 2024 Finland

    University of Oulu

    Degree
    Master's in Computer Science and Engineering, major in Applied Computing
    Thesis
    Augmenting Speech-based Mobile Reviews with Artificial Intelligence
    Advised by
    Prof. Simo Hosio, Prof. Aku Visuri

  2. 2022 Latvia

    Riga Technical University

    Degree
    Bachelor's in Engineering Science, major in Telecommunications
    Thesis
    Evaluation and analysis of FBG characteristic parameters for sensors solutions
    Advised by
    Prof. Jānis Braunfelds

  3. Sri Lanka

    SLTC Research University

    Major
    Electrical and Electronics Engineering

Off the clock

Usually somewhere else.

Trains, old cities, lakes and the occasional horse. Where I go when I am not at a keyboard.

  1. Kavindu Ravishan Perera in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, under the carved stone bridge on Carrer del Bisbe
    01 Barcelona
  2. Kavindu Ravishan Perera sitting on a stone wall beside Lake Como, with mountains across the water
    02 Lake Como
  3. Kavindu Ravishan Perera in front of the Colosseum in Rome on a clear day
    03 Rome
  4. Kavindu Ravishan Perera skiing down a snowy slope under a grey sky
    04 On skis
  5. Kavindu Ravishan Perera on a train to Milan, looking at his phone
    05 On the train to Milan
  6. Kavindu Ravishan Perera sitting at the Trevi Fountain in Rome, among the crowds
    06 Rome
  7. Kavindu Ravishan Perera on a bicycle on a sunny cycle path lined with trees
    07 On two wheels
  8. Kavindu Ravishan Perera at a stone balustrade by a lake, clouds low over the mountains
    08 By the lake
  9. Kavindu Ravishan Perera on an electric scooter in a city square at dusk
    09 At dusk
  10. Kavindu Ravishan Perera in a white hoodie beside a brown horse on a farm
    10 New friend
  11. Kavindu Ravishan Perera walking a small dog along a red cycle path by the woods
    11 Out for a walk
  12. Kavindu Ravishan Perera in a black winter jacket, taking a mirror photo in a green lift
    12 Going up
  13. Kavindu Ravishan Perera on a rooftop terrace in Barcelona, with the towers of the Sagrada Família rising behind him
    13 Barcelona

Get in touch

Available for research collaboration and product work.

ravishankavindu [at] gmail [dot] com