Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Hi. I'm Yudhanjaya Wijeratne.

I'm a storyteller from Colombo, Sri Lanka. I show up in many different guises - an award-winning author, OSINT journalist, data scientist, occasional game designer and AI programmer. Welcome to my portfolio and digital garden.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's Picture
Contributions to the Lunar Codex
Archive

Contributions to the Lunar Codex

In which my work ends up on the Moon, thanks to Samuel Peralta's efforts to archive works by 30,000 artists via NASA Artemis / CLPS program partners.

The Inhuman Peace
Novel

The Inhuman Peace

A biopunk Colombo from an alternate future. Colonialism. A machine uprising. And the consequences.

The Salvage Crew
Novel

The Salvage Crew

AI x language games x space colonization x poetry x Buddhism.

Mohs 5.5 Megastructures
Anthology

Mohs 5.5 Megastructures

A curated collection of global science fiction stories centered around megastructures and massive feats of engineering.

Claws and Effect
Novel

Claws and Effect

A magical cat and a paladin set out to hustle their way through a fantasy world.

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Watchdog

Watchdog

Cofounder + CEO + Editor in Chief

Watchdog is a multidisciplinary team of journalists, researchers and software engineers. We began in April 2019, days after the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, building a mobile app that was used by over 200,000 people to verify information and counteract rumors in their own networks. We've since moved on to identifying mass graves, doing deep data dives into public infrastructure, and building open-source software now used by the Ministry of Health and Red Cross Sri Lanka. We use a lot of OSINT techniques - a combination of data scraping, analysis of publicly available documents and datasets, paired with old-school boots-on-the-ground journalism.

As a fellow for the Dangerous Speech Project, I collected datasets and studied ethnic hatred and justifications of war crimes centered around the Sri Lankan Civil War, as well as the historical context that led up to it.

I functioned as lead designer and writer of Project Witness, an open-source climate-addled future exploring alternate economic structures and their societies. Working with the very multi-disciplinary folks over at Edgeryders, I co-designed societies, built religions, fleshed out institutions, interactions and lore, and built a card game where different types of societies react to Black Swan events. Because of the team, and the sheer variety and depth and understanding of very different economic principles that they held, I came away with a lot more knowledge than I walked in with.

LIRNEasia

LIRNEasia

Senior Researcher, Big Data For Development

Our unit was centered on data science x public policy in the Global South - things like using millions of call detail records to identify where we need better road infrastructure. My work included grounded futurisms, examinations of digital laws, and academic work on corpus linguistics, social networks and machine learning, occasionally carrying out research collaborations with the University of Moratuwa. It greatly honed my understanding of the world and my technical skills, esepcially around linguistics; the majority of outputs from this time are easily available via Google Scholar.

WSO2

WSO2

Marketing exec, Big Data neophyte

At WSO2 I worked on marketing materials and white papers of middleware implementations. These included projects with folks ranging from Transport for London to the Govt of Maldova. Later, I worked on data projects such as the WSO2 Election Monitor, from design to prototyping to implementation. This was where I got into data science proper.