Papers by Pulasthi Gunawardhana
TCSN Newsletter – Issue Fifteen – June 2025 Social Networks Technical Committee, 2025
Social media has become a transformative force in Sri Lanka, shaping how individuals, businesses,... more Social media has become a transformative force in Sri Lanka, shaping how individuals, businesses, and institutions build trust and manage reputations. With a population of over 22 million and an internet penetration rate exceeding 50% as of 2025, platforms like X, Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube are central to communication, information dissemination, and public discourse [1]. However, the interplay of social media with trust and reputation in Sri Lanka is complex, influenced by cultural values, political dynamics, and historical challenges such as ethnic tensions and economic crises. This article analyses how social media affects trust and reputation in Sri Lanka, exploring its opportunities, challenges, and implications. One of the key challenges in Sri Lanka's digital landscape is the lack of digital literacy. Many users are not equipped to differentiate between verified news and misinformation. This has led to the widespread sharing of fake news, hate speech, and scams. The government has, at times, responded with temporary bans on social media platforms, such as during the 2018 anti-Muslim riots and the 2019 attacks, raising concerns about freedom of expression [2].
Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering , 2025
We frequently hear news about compromised systems, virus attacks, spam emails, stolen bank accoun... more We frequently hear news about compromised systems, virus attacks, spam emails, stolen bank account numbers, and loss of money. Safeguarding and protecting digital assets against these and other cyber-attacks are extremely important in our digital connected world today. Many organizations spend substantial amounts of money to protect their digital assets. One type of cyber threat that is rampant these days is social engineering attacks that work on human psychology. These attacks typically persuade, convince, trick and threaten naïve and innocent individuals to divulge sensitive information to the attackers. Consequently, traditional approaches have not been effective or successful in preventing these attack types. In this paper, we propose a machine learning model to detect these types of threats. The model is trained using a large synthetic dataset of 10,000 samples to simulate various types of real-world social engineering threats such as phishing, spear phishing, whaling, vishing, smishing, baiting, and pretexting. Our analysis on attack types, patterns, and characteristics revealed interesting insights. Our model achieved an accuracy of 0.8984 and an F1 score of 0.9253, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting social engineering attacks. The use of synthetic data overcomes the problem of lack of availability of real-world data due to privacy issues, and is demonstrated in this work to be safe, scalable, ethics friendly and effective.
The Education Quarterly Reviews is an Open Access publication. It may be read, copied, and distri... more The Education Quarterly Reviews is an Open Access publication. It may be read, copied, and distributed free of charge according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. The Asian Institute of Research Education Quarterly Reviews is a peer-reviewed International Journal. The journal covers scholarly articles in the fields of education, linguistics, literature, educational theory, research, and methodologies, curriculum, elementary and secondary education, higher education, foreign language education, teaching and learning, teacher education, education of special groups, and other fields of study related to education. As the journal is Open Access, it ensures high visibility and the increase of citations for all research articles published. The Education Quarterly Reviews aims to facilitate scholarly work on recent theoretical and practical aspects of education.
2023 IEEE 8th International Conference for Convergence in Technology (I2CT), 2023
Video content is produced daily through a variety of electronic devices, however, storing and tra... more Video content is produced daily through a variety of electronic devices, however, storing and transmitting video signals in raw format is impractical due to its excessive resource requirement. Through this research, we have checked in the context of Sri Lanka what resources they do have and the possibility of compressing the video signals before storing and transmitting. To improve the user experience, it is important to minimize latency as much as possible. This can be achieved through a variety of methods, such as optimizing the network infrastructure, using compression techniques to reduce the size of the data being transmitted, and using specialized protocols designed to reduce latency.
The Asian Institute of Research Engineering and Technology Quarterly Reviews, 2022
From the Stone Age to the present day, visual communication can be described as a form of communi... more From the Stone Age to the present day, visual communication can be described as a form of communication that has evolved over various topics, from design to technology. As a result of globalization and the transformation of digital citizenship, services such as the Internet have come into the world. With the advent of mobile phones, computers, and television, more and more people are viewing and sharing videos, the need for a lower cost and higher quality methodology. The H.264 standard was successfully introduced in 2003 as another answer to that problem. The H.264 standard, which supported 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolutions, was no longer more practical than 4K resolutions. A decade later, with the introduction of the H265 in 2013, video usage became even more efficient. This was introduced with the combination of MPEG and ITU-T. H.265 codex mostly targets higher resolution video, such as 4k and 8k. Thru this paper, we are looking into the comparison of the technology used in H.264 and H.265. Specially H.264 and H.265 workflow, Transformation and Quantization techniques used, coding Units, Entropy Coding methods, etc. The quality of the output video is expected to be well preserved to the
the point where the frame concealment algorithm proposed leaves a very little negative impact on the video
10th International Conference on Information and Education Technology (ICIET 2022), 2022
Web-Based educational games are a highly interdisciplinary field of research. This paper focused ... more Web-Based educational games are a highly interdisciplinary field of research. This paper focused on techniques to go through when developing web-based games, what technologies need to use, what theoretical background needs to follow when developing a web-based educational game. And also we are discussing here the development process of the web-based game that support to exchange and refresh the knowledge of students either inside or outside the classroom. These measures have been a great help for the game players to use this type of game without any restriction. The players do not have to upgrade their system or download the extra plug-in to play the game. At the same time, they don't have to worry about the internet and data limit.
Ada Derana Business, 2022
Ceylon Today, 2021
‘AI’, long the mainstay of science fiction, is today a very real presence in business, manufactu... more ‘AI’, long the mainstay of science fiction, is today a very real presence in business, manufacturing, Government operations and an array of other sectors as AI applications take on a growing number of tasks. AI is accelerating the transition from the traditional to the digital economy, and at the same time shaping the outlines of the emerging digital economy and society.
Policymakers will need to have a good grasp of the basic requirements for AI as well as its potential as this technology is set to have a big impact on economic development The next phase of economic growth will come from redefining the concept of connectivity altogether – using AI to power Intelligent Connectivity.
By introducing AI to the mix of the five enabling technologies – Broadband, Data Centre, Cloud, Big Data and IoT – basic connectivity can be transformed into Intelligent Connectivity. As a holistic system, Intelligent Connectivity produces synergistic returns across all five enablers that are greater than the sum of their parts. It can enhance human creativity and innovation, and speed the transition from the traditional economy to the digital economy.
Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education (TURCOMAT), 2021
Mobile application technologies developing rapidly. There are numerous OS and system available in... more Mobile application technologies developing rapidly. There are numerous OS and system available in today's market. There are three types of main development methods in mobile application, which are Native, Web and Hybrid. These Hybrid mobile app technologies make easy to develop sound mobile application comparable to Native mobile application. These Hybrid mobile app technologies perform better compared to these native mobile app technologies. Hybrid mobile application technology provides flexibility for cross-platform as well as any mobile OS.
Psychology and Education, 2021
Digital games are the latest learning technologies which need to be confirm the possibility for a... more Digital games are the latest learning technologies which need to be confirm the possibility for applying to both gender equally. Through this paper we are going to discuss about the gender difference on game and how possible apply digital games for learning mathematics with the gender differences. We have reviewed applicable research methods to gain fruitful results on gender aspects. In here we have discuss about the gender-based variety in educational games, developing proper game model, and research and gather evidences on gender aspects and possibility of using digital games for learning mathematics. Through this paper we are going to reveal that boys are more likely to play digital game than girls. And also this paper highlights the differences which type of games boys and girls would like to play and we have describe the reason for choosing games on gender based.
Global Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2020
In modern times, technology has taken on a dominant role in many aspects of human life, and compu... more In modern times, technology has taken on a dominant role in many aspects of human life, and computeraided learning (CAL) is an educational tool that makes learning easier. By employing user interface (UI) design it is easy for students to access learning materials and relevant courses. UI design is an important factor for designing useful and usable CAL to appeal to a wide range of users by making the system flexible, attractive, interactive and easy to use.
Education QuarterlyReviews, May 8, 2020
E-learning is the best platform for distance learning as it is a cost-efficient technology. Dista... more E-learning is the best platform for distance learning as it is a cost-efficient technology. Distance learning through an E-Learning platform offers enormous opportunity for Sri Lanka, because it can open doors to everybody without hassle. Distance learning with E-Learning focuses on delivering education to students without a traditional classroom. Educational institutes in Sri Lanka may use distance learning with students who are unable to follow regular courses. E-Learning runs with web technologies which make interactions for both teachers and students easy. It also makes it easy to exchange relevant educational tools and interactive exercises.
This paper is giving an overview of the process of requirement analysis for software development.... more This paper is giving an overview of the process of requirement analysis for software development. Here I have discussed about key parts in requirement analysing, gathering relevant materials, functional analysis and allocations, how to improve and make a quality process and also document development as well and many more which relates to requirement analysis process. The scope of this study is not a generalized approach but rather discuss through specific cases such as like Dutch flower case. It describes the main areas of requirement process in practice, and highlights. I hope that readers will find this paper useful in guiding them toward the knowledge and resources they needed.
The Island - Sunday News Paper, 2018
Social media is an internet medium through which people or communities connect. Common reasons fo... more Social media is an internet medium through which people or communities connect. Common reasons for social networking are building and maintaining relationships, expressing beliefs and ideas, sharing information, or even combating boredom. Communication can be conducted by communities or groups interacting and sharing information. The most commonly used global social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and LinkedIn. They have become increasingly popular, and social media has become a vital daily routine for most teenagers. most renowned social network, Facebook, launched in 2004; it currently has over one billion active users and is still growing.
Sri Lanka Adyayana, Sep 10, 2016
Technology and Research and Development (R&D) are accepted as the most significant elements to e... more Technology and Research and Development (R&D) are accepted as the most significant elements to eliminate poverty when identifying economic growth and development in developing countries. Most developed countries have already achieved economic growth and technology development through R&D. In this article, I discuss several characteristics of technology development of Sri Lanka and examine the current education and public service structures.
GSTF Journal on Computing (JoC) , 2016
People constantly use social multimedia networks to communicate with one another, with users most... more People constantly use social multimedia networks to communicate with one another, with users mostly sharing data, such as photos and videos. We examine the motivations that drive colluders to form alliances over social networking platforms and determine how these groups create coalitions to advance their interests. We also investigate the network architectures that underlie social multimedia networks and how these platforms circulate. Such architectures are connected to different protocols, including WebID, Semantic Pingback and PubSubHubbub, to form a logical semantic circulating social multimedia network that delivers a centralised social network structure.
GSTF Journal on Computing (JOC), 2016
Technology is developing quickly. Multimedia, a form of technology, is being used as a teaching t... more Technology is developing quickly. Multimedia, a form of technology, is being used as a teaching tool these days. Many researchers and educators have found suitable ways to design multimedia applications in order to achieve fruitful educational outcomes. Not that all we are going to discuss here, the definition of multimedia, and the connection between multimedia and learning tools, concept of multimedia applications, how they are formed using a different media, the type of educational element that effect to learn in their natural environment and the real-world issues. The definitions and characteristics of multimedia and educational elements are explained in this article.
A b s t r a c t Technology is evolving fast and such evolutions are spread all over the world ver... more A b s t r a c t Technology is evolving fast and such evolutions are spread all over the world very quickly. One such evolution witnessed reserved in the gaming world is " Gamificacion ". Gamification is much different than the usual digital game we are familiar with. It moves more freely in the educational game technology. This article cover the background and overview of the gamification, its differences with the usual educational games and discussion about the achievement of gamification to education.
This article discusses the ways in which digital games affect the behaviors of teenagers by promo... more This article discusses the ways in which digital games affect the behaviors of teenagers by promoting aggression. Also highlighted is what the field of neurosciences can tell us about the implications of using digital games, particularly with respect to their effects on teenagers’ brains and, consequently, on their behaviors. In addition, this paper demonstrates the importance of conducting research on the ways in which the use of digital games affect teenagers’ behavior, values and mental health and stresses the need to find ways in which to ensure the safe use of digital games and other new entertainment media.
In this article I will discuss the effects of playing digital games. Most of the researchers have... more In this article I will discuss the effects of playing digital games. Most of the researchers have found out that the effects by playing digital games are greater than the effects by watching the television or movies. I will be discussing mainly the three scopes which support to argue and allow people to get beyond the typical ‘‘good–bad’’ dichotomous thinking to have a more nuanced understanding of the digital game effect and the insights from developmental, positive, and social psychology combined with other learning mechanisms in playing digital games as well as how far it is possible adopt it to real-world psychosocial benefits scenario will also be examined in this article.
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Papers by Pulasthi Gunawardhana
the point where the frame concealment algorithm proposed leaves a very little negative impact on the video
Policymakers will need to have a good grasp of the basic requirements for AI as well as its potential as this technology is set to have a big impact on economic development The next phase of economic growth will come from redefining the concept of connectivity altogether – using AI to power Intelligent Connectivity.
By introducing AI to the mix of the five enabling technologies – Broadband, Data Centre, Cloud, Big Data and IoT – basic connectivity can be transformed into Intelligent Connectivity. As a holistic system, Intelligent Connectivity produces synergistic returns across all five enablers that are greater than the sum of their parts. It can enhance human creativity and innovation, and speed the transition from the traditional economy to the digital economy.