Hiruni Perera

Aspiring Data Scientist

Carlton, VIC 3053

khmp.perera@gmail.comlinkedin.com/in/-hiruni-pererapublic.tableau.com/app/profile/hiruni.perera1562/vizzes

About

Aspiring Data Scientist with a strong foundation in Computer Science and a keen interest in leveraging data to solve complex problems. Completed a Master of Data Science at RMIT University, Melbourne currently open to work with a visa subclass 485. Proficient in R, Python, SQL, Machine Learning, NLP, Neural Networks and cloud computing. Eager to apply strong analytical skills and programming expertise to contribute to innovative projects and drive data-driven decision-making.

Experience

Jun 22 – Apr 23

UI/UX Engineer at Applova INC.

Texas, USA

  • UI/UX Design: Created wireframes and interactive prototypes for kiosks, web stores, merchant portals, and business manager platforms to enhance user experience.
  • Front-End Development: Designed and developed SEO-optimized web pages using Figma, Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap, and ReactJS.
  • User Research and Analysis: Utilized tools like Lucky Orange, Microsoft Clarity, Google Analytics, and Excel to conduct in-depth user behaviour analysis and A/B testing.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Worked closely with cross-functional teams, including developers, product managers, and marketing teams.
  • Project Management: Managed 4 end-to-end design projects from inception to launch.
Jul 20 – Jun 21

Software Engineer Intern at Whitestar Web Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Colombo

  • Significant Projects : Worked as a Laravel developer for Legistant, a cloud-based legal practice management system built for criminal lawyers in Sri Lanka.
  • UI/UX Design: Created wireframes and prototypes, focusing on user experience and accessibility.
  • Front-End Development: Developed responsive and interactive web pages using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WordPress. Ensured SEO best practices.
  • Back-End Development: Contributed to large-scale Laravel projects, leveraging tools like Homestead and TravisCI for efficient development and deployment.
  • Cloud Computing: Independently managed over 5 major projects from inception to deployment, including hosting and deploying on AWS.
  • Team Leadership: Mentored and trained new interns, fostering a collaborative and efficient work environment.

Education

Aug 25 – Now

RMIT University Melbourne

Master of Science in Data Science

Projects : False Information Buster - AI Driven Fake News Detection App, Multi- class classification of glass types using the UCI Glass dataset, AI-Powered Dynamic Newsletter Generation System using RAG with GPT 4.1, Interactive Shiny dashboard for Global Fossil Distribution and Diversity Analysis, Contract Review & Clause Identification Model Comparison

Oct 22 – Now

University of Westminster

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

United Kingdom

First Class

Degree Awarded with Honours First Class, Computer Science Thesis Report: Neural Machine Translation of Legal Documents for Low Resource Languages

Projects

Jan 22 – Now

Neural Machine Translation of Legal Documents for Low Resource Languages

Fine-tuned a MT5 model on a custom made bilingual corpus with 5K sentence pairs; BLEU score = 79 and ROUGE-L score = 80.9.

  • Implemented a Flask app with a React-bootstrap frontend.
Jan 25 – Now

Sentiment Analysis & Topic Modelling of Reddit Posts

Collected and labelled 1.5K posts and 14.3K comments in both English and French; built a VADER + TF-IDF pipeline to analyse sentiment distribution and used a LDA model for topic modelling.

Jan 25 – Now

Time Series Analysis of Property Damage Caused by Lightning Strikes in Texas

Extracted, cleaned, and wrangled 14 years of NOAA Storm Events data on lightning-related property damage

  • Performed end-to-end time-series analysis and developed forecasting models to predict future damage trends
Jan 23 – Now

Legal Tech Newsletter

The writer of a Linkedin newsletter based on legal technology since 2023

  • The newsletter reaches 700+ subscribers with concise, lawyer-focused insights on data privacy, AI, and legal tech innovations.

Skills

Technical Skills

PythonRSQLPandasNumpyScikit-learnSpaCyNLTKTensorflowPytorchKerasGitAWSHuggingface TransformersLLMsExcelTableau

Data & ML Skills

Data analysis and visualizationData wrangling and preparationMachine learning algorithmsDatabase managementNatural Language ProcessingAdvanced programming skillsDistributed Computing (AWS)

Other Skills

Project ManagementPublic Speaking/Presenting

Languages

English
Curvit