Athula Ginige is Professor of Information Technology at Western Sydney University (WSU), Australia and he leads the Social Computing and Knowledge Ecosystems Research Program at the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics. This program focuses on developing knowledge driven Social Computing solutions delivered via mobile based systems to a range of applied problems including “Grand Challenges” in diverse areas such as agriculture, healthcare, business and education. His current research areas include both autonomous and participatory sensor networks, knowledge aggregation and event detection, large scale knowledge organisation based on ontologies and semantic web technologies, context modelling, designing mobile based systems for user empowerment and Social Computing. Digital Knowledge Ecosystems integrate all these technologies and methodologies to provide innovative and sometimes disruptive solutions to real world challenges.

Prof Ginige has previously done some pioneering work to establish the discipline area of Web Engineering which he is now extending to mobile based applications. He has also done extensive research in the areas of e-Business and e-Transformation. In 2016 he won the Australian Computer Society Digital Disrupter Gold award for developing the Digital Knowledge Ecosystem for Agribusiness. He has over 250 Journal and Conference publications and given many keynotes at conferences.  He has successfully supervised 15 PhD students. He graduated with B.Sc. Engineering first class honours from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, England in 1987.