Shehan Edirimannage

Shehan Edirimannage is currently pursuing his PhD degree in Computer Science at the School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. He received his Bachelor of Science (Hons.) degree in Computer Science from the University of Colombo School of Computing, Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2022. His research interests include Machine Learning, Distributed Systems and Computing, Blockchain, Privacy, and Secure Computing.

Research: Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed model training across mobile devices without centralizing raw data, addressing privacy concerns in modern applications. Yet deploying FL on real-world mobile networks remains challenging: client populations are statistically and computationally heterogeneous, participants may behave dishonestly, model updates leak sensitive information, and individual clients have unique data distributions that evolve over time. Existing approaches address these challenges in isolation, leaving an integrated, deployable framework as an open problem. Shehan's work presents a unified approach to FL on mobile networks, organized as four sequential challenges across the federation lifecycle. The unifying contribution is a design philosophy of quality-aware intelligence: every stage of the lifecycle uses a quality signal, operationalized differently per stage, to guide intelligent participation, trust verification, privacy-preserving communication, and personalized adaptation.