Buddhika Hasantha Kasthuriarachchy

Supervisors: Associate Professor Madhu Chetty, Dr Gour Karmakar and Mr Darren Walls
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology
b.kasthuriarachchy@federation.edu.au
Doctor of Philosophy

“Sports, cultural experience and social media analytics”

Sport has a place at the heart of every culture. Supporting the home team is a truly local experience and an exhilarating one at that. SportsHosts, a Melbourne based start-up company proposes to connect local fans (hosts) with travellers (guests) to go to live sports together. What better way to learn about a place and its culture than with the most passionate locals? One of the key objectives of SportsHosts at the moment is to grow their client base exponentially by leveraging social media and big data analytics. Hence, this Ph.D. project aims to tackle the problem of automatically identifying and classifying dynamically, socially produced online textual data to understand user behaviours. To achieve this, during the first phase of the study, we are planning to design novel intention analysis algorithms to identify information of interest from noisy data channels. A wide range of features and methods for user intention analysis across different spheres, ranging from wishes to offering help to buying commercial products to sexual assaults, have been researched in recent years. Given the complexity to understand the intent from natural language, researchers have explored various approaches using both rule-based methods and machine learning techniques including deep learning.

Buddhika Kasthuriarachchy is supported by full scholarship from GLOBAL HOSTS PTY LTD trading as SPORTSHOSTS,
a Melbourne-based company, and a Fee-Offset Scholarship through Federation University.