Mr Lakshitha Kumaranayakalage
School of Science, Engineering & Environment
Current positions
Hourly Paid Academic
Biography
Lakshitha Kumaranayakalage (Lucky) works on one question: how do we build AI systems that are safe enough to trust in healthcare, in small businesses and in universities, and useful enough to be worth deploying? He approaches it from two sides. He researches and teaches it, and he builds it.
Lakshitha is an Associate Lecturer and Research Associate at Salford Business School, University of Salford, where he teaches AI in the Workplace and Managing Information Systems and Transformation and contributes to the university's work on policy for artificial intelligence. He supervises undergraduate and postgraduate projects across business, computing and engineering. Through the Centre for Sustainable Innovation he worked on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership in health technology and on the AI-Cybersecurity Nexus project, a government-funded programme that helped small and medium-sized businesses across the UK adopt AI-driven cyber security.
In industry he was a software engineer at ELAROS 24/7, a UK health technology company serving NHS and research partners. Outside the university he designs and ships production AI products through his own software practice, so his research questions come from real deployments.
He has more than eight years of software engineering experience and more than five years of university teaching in Sri Lanka, Australia and the United Kingdom. He holds an MSc in Data Science with Machine Learning (Distinction).
Lakshitha welcomes collaboration with research groups, health and industry partners and public bodies, in particular where a project needs both academic rigour and applied AI engineering.
Areas of Research
Agentic AI security, AI safety, large language models, clinical natural language processing, healthcare AI, cyber security for small businesses, sim-to-real robotics, robot learning, responsible AI adoption, AI governance, AI in the workplace, information systems, applied machine learning, data analytics, cloud and software engineering.
Four current themes:
Agentic AI security: how autonomous AI agents can resist manipulation through the content they process, and fail safely when they do not.
Clinical natural language processing: how language models can extract reliable and transparent information from clinical text for healthcare use.
Sim-to-real robotics: how robots can learn skills in simulation and transfer them to the physical world.
Responsible AI adoption: what policies, skills and governance let workplaces, small businesses and universities use AI safely and fairly.
Artificial intelligence in the workplace, management information systems, digital transformation, data analytics, business intelligence, Power BI, web development, software engineering, cloud systems.
Lakshitha teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate level in Salford Business School and supervises dissertations and final-year projects across business, computing and engineering. Modules he teaches or has contributed to at the University of Salford include AI in the Workplace, Managing Information Systems and Transformation, Business Innovation and Digital Transformation, Business Data Insights and Analytics, Business Intelligence in Practice, and web development. He also runs data analytics workshops and seminars, including hands-on Power BI sessions where students build dashboards from real business data. He uses live industry examples from his software engineering work, and welcomes industry partners into the classroom. He has taught in higher education for more than five years in Sri Lanka, Australia and the United Kingdom, including programme coordination for professional computing qualifications.
Qualifications
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MSc Data Science with Machine Learning (Distinction)
2023 - 2024 -
BSc Software Engineering (SCQF Level 9), Scottish Qualifications Authority
2017 - 2021
Recognitions
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Research Associate, AI-Cybersecurity Nexus project (Gov.UK funded)