Prasan Priyadarshana Yapa Wins Honorable Mention at 2024 IEEE CIS Grand Competition

Prasan Priyadarshana Yapa, a second-year doctoral student at KUAS Graduate School of Engineering and a member of the Ubiquitous and Personal Computing Laboratory (directed by Dr. Zilu Liang), received an Honorable Mention Award at the 2024 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Student Grand Competition on Computational Intelligence in Biomedicine and Healthcare, for his proposal titled “Vishadha: Early Smart Depression Detector”. This competition is affiliated with the 2024 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, the world’s largest technical event on computational intelligence. This is the second consecutive year that a member of the Ubiquitous and Personal Computing Laboratory has won this award.

Yapa’s proposal focuses on designing and developing an AI system to detect the severity of human depression through text-based multi-party conversation (MPC) analysis. The system analyzes social media MPC data, generating contextual embeddings with a pre-trained language model (PLM) to predict responses and identify speakers. The system also introduces an enhanced BERT-based PLM for discourse parsing, prompt tuning for depression detection, and neural network based multi-class classification for severity levels. The code is made publicly available on GitHub to benefit the research and developer community.

(Zilu Liang, Faculty of Engineering)