Dineth Jayakody

Wadduwage Lab

Norfolk, VA, USA

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Old Dominion University, working with Dr. Dushan Wadduwage in the Wadduwage Lab. My research sits at the intersection of applied machine learning, biomedical imaging, causal inference, and natural language processing.

I graduated with First Class Honours in Electrical and Information Engineering from the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka, with the highest OGPA in my batch (3.94/4.00). I also spent time as a software engineer at Codegen International, where I built LLM applications, RAG pipelines, and enterprise software.

Research interests: applied ML, AI for biomedical applications, out-of-distribution detection, differentiable microscopy, optical neural networks, and domain-specific NLP.

A more complete record is on my CV and publications pages. You can also find me on Google Scholar.

news

May 01, 2026	Accepted participant and poster presenter at the Gordon Research Conference on Optics and Photonics in Medicine and Biology, and selected for the CLIMB Biophotonics Summer School at UIUC.
Apr 01, 2026	SentimentLens accepted at IEEE IRI 2026.
Mar 01, 2026	Paper accepted at the MMFM-BIOMED Workshop @ CVPR 2026: When Multimodal Models Stop Listening.
Aug 01, 2025	Started my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Old Dominion University as a Graduate Research Assistant in the Wadduwage Lab.
Jun 01, 2025	Received the Ronnie De Mel Gold Medal, Dr. A.D.V. Premaratne Memorial Gold Medal, BOC Award, and Vice Chancellor’s Award from the University of Ruhuna.

selected publications

CVPR-W

When Multimodal Models Stop Listening: Modality Imbalance Induces Dominant-Modality Bias in Biomedicine

Dineth Jayakody and Dushan Wadduwage

In MMFM-BIOMED Workshop at CVPR, 2026

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{jayakody2026modality,
  title = {When Multimodal Models Stop Listening: Modality Imbalance Induces Dominant-Modality Bias in Biomedicine},
  author = {Jayakody, Dineth and Wadduwage, Dushan},
  booktitle = {MMFM-BIOMED Workshop at CVPR},
  year = {2026},
}

IRI

SentimentLens: Reconciling Sentiment and Ratings via Dual-Modality in the Hospitality Sector

Dineth Jayakody, Pasindu Thenahandi, and Sampath Jayarathne

In IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI), 2026

Bib

@inproceedings{jayakody2026sentimentlens,
  title = {SentimentLens: Reconciling Sentiment and Ratings via Dual-Modality in the Hospitality Sector},
  author = {Jayakody, Dineth and Thenahandi, Pasindu and Jayarathne, Sampath},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI)},
  year = {2026},
}

GRC

Beyond Perfect Scores: Proof-by-Contradiction for Trustworthy Machine Learning

Dushan Wadduwage, Dineth Jayakody, and Leonidas Zimianitis

In Gordon Research Conference on Optics and Photonics in Medicine and Biology, 2026

Bib

@inproceedings{wadduwage2026beyond,
  title = {Beyond Perfect Scores: Proof-by-Contradiction for Trustworthy Machine Learning},
  author = {Wadduwage, Dushan and Jayakody, Dineth and Zimianitis, Leonidas},
  booktitle = {Gordon Research Conference on Optics and Photonics in Medicine and Biology},
  year = {2026},
}

SDSC

MultiSense-Pneumo: A Multimodal Learning Framework for Pneumonia Screening in Resource-Constrained Settings

Dineth Jayakody, Pasindu Thenahandi, Chameli Dilshani Menike Dommanige, and 2 more authors

In Springer proceedings of SDSC, 2026

Bib

@inproceedings{jayakody2026multisense,
  title = {MultiSense-Pneumo: A Multimodal Learning Framework for Pneumonia Screening in Resource-Constrained Settings},
  author = {Jayakody, Dineth and Thenahandi, Pasindu and Dommanige, Chameli Dilshani Menike and Pokojovy, Michael and Han, Henry},
  booktitle = {Springer proceedings of SDSC},
  year = {2026},
}

PACLIC

Enhanced Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Integrated Category Extraction for Instruct-DeBERTa

D.S. Jayakody, K. Isuranda, N. Silva, and 3 more authors

In 38th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC), 2024

Bib HTML PDF

@inproceedings{jayakody2024paclic,
  title = {Enhanced Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Integrated Category Extraction for Instruct-DeBERTa},
  author = {Jayakody, D.S. and Isuranda, K. and de Silva, N. and Sandamali, G.G.N. and Sudheera, K.L.K. and Rajith, S.},
  booktitle = {38th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC)},
  year = {2024},
  address = {Tokyo, Japan},
}