Dr. Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe completed her doctoral degree at the Warwick Business School in 2018. She now works as a visiting researcher at the Alan Turing Institute and also commercially as the lead data scientist at Popsa (using AI to automatically curate people's photos into beautifully designed products). Chanuki's research interests entail using big online datasets and deep learning to understand how the aesthetics of the environment influences human wellbeing. Her research has been featured in the press worldwide including in the Economist, Wired, The Times, BBC, Spiegel Online, Guardian, Telegraph and Scientific American. Before returning to university, Chanuki had a diverse career that included running her own digital design consultancy for over eight years.

Find out more:
www.thoughtsymmetry.com
LinkedIn Profile
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Supervisors: Dr. Suzy Moat and Dr. Tobias Preis

Recent media coverage of my research includes:

The Economist: Computer analysis of what is scenic may help town planners
BBC Click: Algorithm learns to understand natural beauty
Wired: An AI has been trained to understand beauty
The Times: City vistas prove easier on eye than green belt
Scientific American: 60-Second Science Teaching Computers to Enjoy the View
Guardian: Beauty spot or landscape blot? Computer trained to judge scenery
Scientific American: 60-Second Science: Photos Tagged as Art Linked to Rising Property Prices
Guardian: Does a pretty office make a productive workforce?
Telegraph: Beautiful urban architecture boosts health as much as green spaces
Popular Science: Can Street Art Help Increase a Neighborhood’s Property Values?

Publications:

Using Deep Learning to Quantify the Beauty of Outdoor Places
Quantifying the Impact of Scenic Environments on Health
Quantifying the Link Between Art and Property Prices in Urban Neighbourhoods
Quantifying Scenic Areas Using Crowdsourced Data
Happiness is Greater in More Scenic Locations
Street-Frontage-Net: urban image classification using deep convolutional neural networks

For more publications see: http://www.thoughtsymmetry.com/

Teaching activities:

Mentor on FutureLearn MOOC Big Data: Measuring and Predicting Human Behaviour
Big Data Analytics, MSc in Finance, Warwick Business School
Big Data Analytics, MSc in Business, Warwick Business School
Deep Learning Workshop: Convolutional Neural Networks, The Alan Turing Institute

Review Activities:

PLOS ONE
International Conference on Computational Social Science
International Conference in Web and Social Media
Data for Policy 2017
International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Journal of Medical Internet Research
Palgrave Communications
Sociological Methods and Research

Dr. Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe

cseresinhe at turing dot ac dot uk