Nadeeshan De Silva

Nadeeshan De Silva

Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science @ William & Mary

Nadeeshan De Silva

Hello there! My name is Nadeeshan De Silva (නදීෂාන් ද සිල්වා in Sinhalese script). I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at William & Mary, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Oscar Chaparro.

Resume: Resume
Unofficial Transcript: Unofficial transcript

I broadly work on applyinig {machine, deep} learning to assist developers in software engineering tasks. My doctoral research is currently focused on studying how code comprehensibility be used to improve code refactoring and improving bug report management systems using AI techniques such as Large Language Models(LLM)s and Large Multimodal Models(MLLM)s. I am also interested in software maintenance, software testing, and data analytics.

Before joining William and Mary I started working as a Software Engineer at Enactor, Sri Lanka. Then after 9th months I was promoted as Senior Software Engineer. I was part of multiple teams; core platform, automated testing and devops.

I received my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka in 2020. I completed my thesis on “Dynamic Phylogenetic Tree Construction Using LSH and K-mers” with Dr. Indika Perera and Dr. Anuradha Wickramasinghe. As an undergraduate, I interned at WSO2 in Sri Lanka, where I worked on developing a proof of concept for “WSO2 Healthcare Solutions” under the guidance of Mr. Nuwan Bandara and Mr. Chanaka Fernando.

Outside work, I love spending time playing tennis, watching movies, nature walks, and trying out new recipes.

News!

  • Sep 2025 Our paper titled “Ladybug: A github bot for ui-enhanced bug localization in mobile apps” got accepted to IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME’25) in the tool demo track.
  • Oct 2024 Servered as a Junior Program Committee member for IEEE International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR’24).
  • March 2024 Nominated as a recipient of the International Student Oppertunity Scholarship from the College of William and Mary.
  • February 2024 Presented our paper at ICSE’24 in Lisbon, Portugal.
  • February 2024 Received ACM SIGSOFT travel grant to attend ICSE’24 in Lisbon, Portugal.
  • October 2023 Our paper titled “On Using GUI Interaction Data to Improve Text Retrieval-based Bug Localization” got accepted to International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’24) in the research track.
  • July 2023 Our paper titled “BURT: A Chatbot for Interactive Bug Reporting”, got accepted to International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’23) in the tool demo track.
  • September 2022 Started my Ph.D in Computer Science at The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA.
  • July 2022 Left my first job at Enactor, Sri Lanka.
  • September 2021 Promoted as a Senior Software Engineer at Enactor, Sri Lanka.
  • February 2020 Started working as a Software Engineer at Enactor, Sri Lanka (Engineering teams in Sri Lanka of the HQ of Enactor UK, Hertford Hertfordshire).
  • January 2020 Graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka with a second class upper division in BSc.(Hons.) in Computer Science & Engineering.