Ravidu Silva
PhD Candidate in AI @ Nottingham Trent University
Nottingham Trent University
United Kingdom
I research how compact AI models can produce outputs that are explainable and verifiable, applied in my PhD to personalised and trustworthy learning material, and I build AI systems deployed in the real world.
My PhD at Nottingham Trent University focuses on transitional learners, students moving between stages and/or educational environments. Methodologically, I work on compact LLMs (LoRA/QLoRA, GRPO reinforcement learning) that generate executable and renderable artefacts in interactive execution loops, so that what a model produces can be verified rather than taken on trust. My research across generative AI, explainable AI (XAI), and medical imaging has been published in venues including IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Foundations of LLM Post-Training, UKCI, and SN Computer Science. Alongside the research, I build interactive explainability tools such as Glass-box GPT, which trains a tiny GPT in your browser and shows why it writes each character. I also lecture at NTU on mathematics, databases and C++.
Before the PhD, I led the R&D team at BooleenLab (formerly BooleanLabs) in Colombo, building commercial AI products for clients in the US, UK and Singapore. At Ensera Design (formerly Kinneir Dufort) in Bristol, I built the back end for AI-assisted breast cancer diagnosis, an AI classifier deployed across 80 Windows IoT kiosks, and embedded C/C++ drivers for STM32 microcontrollers.
I work mainly in Python, PyTorch, and C++, from mathematical formulation through to production deployment. Next, I want to take explainable, verifiable AI onto edge hardware and small robots. I will complete my PhD in late 2027 and am looking for research-focused roles in the UK from autumn 2027.
Research interests:
- Generative AI and compact LLMs for personalised education
- Execution-grounded reinforcement learning and LLM post-training
- Explainable and verifiable AI, especially for computer vision
- AI for medical imaging and digital health
- Edge AI: compact and quantized models on embedded and robotic hardware
news
| Oct 15, 2026 | Launched Glass-box GPT, an interactive explainability tool that trains a tiny GPT in your browser and shows why it writes each character. |
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| Oct 15, 2026 | Our paper “ArtBrain: An Explainable End-to-End Toolkit for Classification and Attribution of AI-Generated Art and Style” has been published in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia! |
| Sep 30, 2026 | Our paper “Visually Grounded Reinforcement Learning for LLM Programmatic Animation Generation in Interactive Execution Environments” has been accepted to the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Foundations of LLM Post-Training in Changing Environments! |
| Sep 10, 2026 | Presented our paper “LessonBench-V1: A Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating AI Lesson Generation Agents” at UKCI 2026. It is now in press in the Springer Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing series. |
| Jul 15, 2026 | Released the LessonBench-V1 benchmark preprint and dataset for evaluating AI lesson-generation agents, following our April preprint on ManimTrainer & ManimAgent. |