He has a BSc in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1983, an MSc in Computing from the University of Cardiff, UK in 1990 and a PhD in Natural Language Processing from the University of Cardiff, UK in 1994. He has been at University of Colombo since 1994. He is presently a Senior Lecturer in the

newly formed University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC). He is also the Head of the Department of Computation and Intelligent Systems within the UCSC. He has been an ERCIM scholar at INRIA, France (2001) and a Fulbright Scholar at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA (2002). Dr. Weerasinghe also Coordinates the Research Masters Program in Computer Science at the UCSC and is a member of the UCSC's Academic Syndicate and Board of Management. He is also involved in two donor funded e-Learning and Web-based training projects currently underway at the UCSC and is a member of the University Network and Web Committees. He was also the University's representative for two Inter-University IT Infrastructure and Human Resource Development projects funded by SIDA and ADB respectively. He is a consultant to the UCSC's consultancy arm, the Computing Services Centre on many past and current projects mainly focusing on State sector computerization and web-enablement. Apart from his university roles, he is also part of the National Committee standardizing the Sinhala UNICODE and Keyboard layout standards and a founding member of the National Internet Committee and the National Domain Name Registry. In addition, he is involved in many projects related to the government's World Bank funded e-Sri Lanka project handled by the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka including as a member of a consultative committee to evaluate Distance Electronic Learning projects for Sri Lanka. He is also a member of the Organizing Committee of the Annual International Information Technology Conference (IITC) held annually in Sri Lanka and is the current year's chairman of the Papers Committee. He is a consultant to the UCSC's consultancy arm,

the Computing Services Centre on many past and current projects mainly focusing on State sector computerization and web-enablement. Apart from his university roles, he is also part of the National Committee standardizing the Sinhala UNICODE and Keyboard layout standards and a founding member of the National Internet Committee and the National Domain Name Registry. In addition, he is involved in many projects related to the government's World Bank funded e-Sri Lanka project handled by the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka including as a member of a consultative committee to eval-

uate Distance Electronic Learning projects for Sri Lanka. He is also a member of the Organizing Committee of the Annual International Information Technology Conference (IITC) held annually in Sri Lanka and is the current year's chairman of the Papers Committee.

Prof. J.B. Dissanayake, a widely accepted Sinhala expert of renown who will be responsible for all linguistic aspects of the project including training.

Mr. S.T. Nandasara, who has a long history in the field of Sinhala language support on computers beginning in a DOS environment and will be primarily responsible for the TTS component of the present project.

Mr. Lalith Premarante, a final year PhD candidate devising a new method of optical character recognition optimized for recognizing Sinhala characters who will be responsible for training and development of the OCR component.

Mr. Harsha Wijewardhane, an experienced software developer and current coordinator of the Sinhala UNICODE font and keyboard implementation work who will be primarily responsible for fundamental aspects of language implementation such as collation sequence and sorting, development, deployment, testing and quality assurance aspects of the products to be delivered.