Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner to Australia, Yasoja Gunasekera, visited the University of Canberra’s Collaborative Robotics Lab — founded and led by Sri Lankan Australian academic Professor Damith Herath — and met four Sri Lankan doctoral researchers working there, the Colombo Gazette reported.
The visit took place on 8 October 2026. The account was published on 14 October, six days later.
The four researchers, and what each is working on
The mission’s account names all four and describes their projects — unusual specificity for a diplomatic readout, and the most substantive part of the filing:
- Buddhi Gamage — embodied artificial intelligence, cognitive robotics and robot learning.
- Kalana Ratnayake — large language model-based generative behaviour planning for social robots.
- Moniesha Thilakarathna — a multimodal robotic grasping technique to classify inorganic materials found in organic waste.
- Nipuni Wijesinghe — enhancing human-robot interaction, particularly in healthcare settings.
Three of the four sit in the social- and service-robotics end of the field — robot learning, social-robot behaviour, and human-robot interaction in healthcare. Thilakarathna’s is the outlier, applying robotic grasping to waste sorting. The filing does not say whether the grouping reflects the laboratory’s own research priorities or is coincidental.
The meeting at the top
Gunasekera met the University of Canberra’s Vice-Chancellor, Bill Shorten, and discussed strengthening institutional links, collaborative research and student exchange between Sri Lankan universities and the university.
The filing does not mention it, but Shorten is a former leader of the Australian Labor Party and a former federal minister who left Parliament in 2025 to take the university post — which makes this a meeting with a figure of some political weight in Canberra, not only an academic administrator.
No instrument, and no Sri Lankan university named
The visit produced no reported agreement. The filing describes exploring opportunities and discussing partnerships, but records no memorandum, no funding commitment and no scheduled follow-up. That is worth stating plainly rather than leaving implied: a readout of this kind would normally lead on a signing if there had been one.
Nor does it name a single Sri Lankan university as a prospective partner, give any figure for existing research collaboration, or say whether the four doctoral projects carry Sri Lankan institutional involvement or funding.
For comparison, when the Bar Association signed a cooperation agreement with the Law Council of Australia in September, the instrument, the signatories and the occasion were all identified.
The context the release does not supply
The mission’s framing is that Sri Lankan researchers are contributing to technological innovation in Australia. That is a fair description of the four projects. It sits alongside a harder figure from the other direction: in February, Australia refused 38% of Sri Lankan higher-education visa applications, placing Sri Lanka among the top five rejection rates as Canberra tightened migration settings.
Those facts are not in conflict — doctoral researchers already in place are a different cohort from new applicants — but a discussion of “student exchange opportunities” has a visa dimension the release does not address.
Not reported
This is a High Commission account carried by a single verified outlet, with no independent reporting attached and no comment from the university, from Professor Herath or from any of the four researchers. No other verified newsroom had filed on the visit at the time of writing.
It does not say who else was in the High Commission delegation, how long the four researchers have been at the laboratory, what stage their doctorates are at, or whether any of them intends to return to Sri Lanka. It gives no founding date or size for the Collaborative Robotics Lab, and does not say when Professor Herath established it.