Dr Hettiachchi is a Lecturer at the School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S), where he was previously a Research Fellow. His key research interests are crowdsourcing, social computing, responsible AI, and human-computer interaction. Dr Hettiachchi researches user interactions with automated decision-making systems and explores how biases manifest, influencing future system decisions and user perceptions. He obtained his PhD from the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and his thesis examined data quality in crowdsourcing.
Dr Hettiachchi has published his research in flagship venues of human-computer interaction (CHI), social computing (CSCW), and crowdsourcing (HCOMP). He has received several grants, including the DAAD AInet Fellowship in Human-Centred AI, an Early Career Research Grant from ADM+S, the Google Travel Scholarship and the Melbourne Research Scholarship. He has over seven years of teaching experience as a lecturer and tutor at three universities in Australia and Sri Lanka. Dr Hettiachchi actively collaborates and engages with the international research community and has served in numerous conference organising and program committees.