Research Grants

About Prof. V K Samaranayake Research Grants

The Prof. V.K. Samaranayake grants scheme aims to promote a culture of research and innovation in Networking and Internet-related fields in Sri Lanka by facilitating exposure of researchers to the global research community. Accordingly, it will finance research activities of full-time Masters and PhD candidates registered in Sri Lankan universities.

Types of Grants

Top-up grants for post-graduate research (Deadline: rolling)

Top-up grants are for students who have obtained a first-class or second class upper division in his/her first degree and already registered in a Masters/PhD programme full-time. The total top-up amount will not exceed the Rupee equivalent of US$300 a month. Awards are initially for a period of 12 months which may be renewed upon satisfactory performance during the year awarded. The period for which the top-up grant will be awarded need not exactly overlap with that for which the monthly allowance is received.

Completed applications (.doc, .pdf) with scanned versions of supporting documents (.pdf, .jpg, .gif, .png) should be emailed as a compressed archive (.zip, .rar) to grants@domains.lk

To apply for a Top-up Grant download an application here.

Download

Conference/Workshop and Publication grants (Deadline: rolling)

Conference/Workshop and Publication grants are aimed at funding full time MSc, MPhil and PhD students and academic staff at the probationary and confirmed lecturer grades who wish to present and publish full papers in reputed International Conferences and Journals.

Conferences include those which are listed in a recognised index such as Scopus or are part of ACM, IEEE, USENIX, or IFIP. The grant amount will not exceed the Rupee equivalent of US$2000. If the conference is neither listed nor are part of the aforementioned, the conference’s H5 ranking on Google Scholar will be used for assessment (https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vg=eng). For conferences with a Google H5 index below 20 the grant amount will not exceed the Rupee equivalent of US$1000. Grants will not be given for Conferences without a Google H5 Index or not in any of the listings above.

The Grant will only cover registration at the “Early Bird” rate. Therefore, it is recommended you apply for the grant at least 10 days before the close of “Early Bird” registration.”

A student can re-apply for a VKS Conference Grant only after 12 months of completing a previous visit.

Completed applications (.doc, .pdf) with scanned versions of supporting documents (.pdf, .jpg, .gif, .png) should be emailed as a compressed archive (.zip, .rar) to grants@domains.lk

To apply for a Conference/Workshop and Publication Grant download an application here.

Download

Short Stay/Summer School grants (Deadline: rolling)

Short-stay grants are awarded to assist applicants who have secured short-term academic visits to foreign institutions for research work. The maximum number of grants and grant size will depend on the availability of funds. The short-stay must have a minimum duration of 25 days. Short-stay grants will only include a fixed ‘setup’ fee of Rupee equivalent of US$600 plus return airfare, airport transfer fare and the visa fee.

A student can re-apply for a Stort-stay Grant only after 12 months of completing a previous visit.

Completed applications (.doc, .pdf) with scanned versions of supporting documents (.pdf, .jpg, .gif, .png) should be emailed as a compressed archive (.zip, .rar) to grants@domains.lk

To apply for a Short-stay Grant download an application here.

Download

Success Stories

Aloka

Aloka Fernando

BSc (Hons) in Engineering, BCS-UK currently is conducting her post-graduate research at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Moratuwa


I have altogether work experience of twelve years, in both the IT industry and academia. My ongoing research is to improve low-resource Neural Machine Translation by means of data augmentation. I have worked on data augmentation techniques such as synthetic parallel sentence generation and parallel sentence mining. Further, I have contributed to developing linguistic tools and resources specific to the Sinhala language… Read More

puruthiran

Peranantham Uruthiran

BSc (Jaffna), MSc in IT (UCSC), MSc in CS (AIT, Thailand) Academic Staff of the Department of Software Technology, University of Vocational Technology


I, Peranantham Uruthiran, was given the Professor V.K. Samaranayake conference grant award which was really a strong support factor in influencing my research career as a Machine Learning and Multimedia Data Analysis. It granted me financial support to present my research paper at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Data Sciences (AiDAS2019). This was technically co-sponsored by the IEEE… Read More

Shyama

Shyama Wilson

Lecturer, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Department of Computer Science and Informatics, Uva Wellassa University, Badulla, BCS(Hons), University of Ruhuna, Matara, MPhil(Reading), University of Colombo School of Computing


I am Shyama Wilson, a lecturer at Uva Wellassa University in Badulla and an MPhil candidate at the University of Colombo School of Computing. My MPhil was totally self-funded. However, it was a great blessing for me to be awarded the Professor V.K. Samaranayake Conference Grant, which enabled me to publish a book chapter entitled “Ontology Quality Evaluation Methodology”… Read More

Chirath

Chirath Hettiarachchi

BSc (Hons) and MSc (Research) from the University of Moratuwa, current PhD student at the Australian National University


I was very fortunate to receive the Professor V.K. Samaranayake conference grant, which supported me in attending the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Conference (AIME) held in Poland in 2019. The grant covered all my expenses, including the conference registration, accommodation, and airfare. This gave me a golden opportunity to present my MSc (Research)… Read More

Sulochana

Dr. Sulochana Sooriyaarachchi

Senior Lecture, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa


I am a senior lecture in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa. I am the founder and the leader of the IntelliSense Lab in the department currently handling grants worth around Rs. 50 million, and a research team of around 10 engineers and postgraduate researchers. I conduct research and product development in collaboration with industry and multidisciplinary academics in the areas of Robotics, and IoT… Read More

Peramunugamage_Anuradha

Anuradha Peramunugamage

Programmer cum System Analyst, Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa,


I, Anuradha Peramunugamage, was awarded a travel grant by Professor VK Samaranayake twice to attend international conferences in Greece and Dubai. It covered all of my expenses, including the conference registration fee, airline tickets, visa fees, and lodging. The grant application process is straightforward and painless for the applicant, and I received all funds prior to traveling. I funded my MPhil entirely on my own,… Read More

Instructions for emailing applications

  • Application should be completed and sent in either DOC or PDF format.
  • All documents within the compressed archive should be named as follows:”granttype_initials_surname_documenttype.***”
    granttype = workshop, conference, publication, top-up, short-stay
    initials = your initials without separation by periods. e.g.: ALN instead of A.L.N.
    surname = your surname or family name
    document type = application, attachment (with a number for multiple attachments), proof (for studentship)
  • The naming convention for compressed archive should be “granttype_initials_surname.zip”
  • Scanned documents should be sent in either pdf(preferred) or jpg format.
  • Grantees are responsible for obtaining foreign currency. If, for any reason, the grantee is unable to obtain foreign currency, he/she shall promptly reimburse any amounts received to the Registry.