Samantha (Darshini) Mahendran

Samantha (Darshini) Mahendran

Graduate Research Assistant

Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU)

Biography

A graduate research assistant and a Ph.D. student in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) lab at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), USA. I work mainly on NLP-related projects, specially Relation Extraction (RE), Named Entity Recognition (NER). After earning my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in 2015, I explored my passion for the software industry. Worked as both a software engineer and a quality assurance engineer. My expertise mainly includes NLP, Artificial Intelligence/Deep Learning, and Machine Learning. Proficient in Python, Java, and C/C++. A self-motivated, hard worker seeking an opportunity to work in a challenging research environment that proves my skills and utilizes my knowledge & intelligence.

Download my resumé.

Interests
  • NLP
  • Machine Learning
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Information Extraction
Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2017 - Present

    Virginia Commonwealth University, USA

  • BSc Computer Science (Special), 2011 - 2015

    University of Peradeniya, SL

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Graduate Research Assistant
Virginia Commonwealth University, College of Engineering
Aug 2019 – Present Richmond, VA
 
 
 
 
 
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Virginia Commonwealth University, College of Engineering
Aug 2017 – Jul 2019 Richmond, VA
 
 
 
 
 
Engineer
MilleniumIT
Mar 2016 – Jul 2017 Colombo, Sri Lanka
 
 
 
 
 
Trainee Software Engineer
IFS R&D
Sep 2015 – Dec 2015 Colombo, Sri Lanka
 
 
 
 
 
Student Researcher
University of Peradeniya
Jan 2015 – Sep 2015 Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

Honors & Awards

CAPWIC scholarship
Christopher newport university (CNU) Mar 2021
To attend and present in the ACM CAPWIC conference
3rd Place in Best student paper competition
American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Mar 2021
Nominated for Best student paper as one of the six finalists. Ranked 3rd in the competition.
Travel grant award - 2021
Virginia Commonwealth University Mar 2021
Awarded to attend and deliver a talk in the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)-2021 Virtual Informatics Summit
Travel grant award - 2019
Virginia Commonwealth University Nov 2019
Awarded to attend and deliver a talk in the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)-2019 Annual Symposium
3rd Place in Hackathon
Virginia Commonwealth University, USA Nov 2019
Won third place in VCU RamHacks-2019 organized by VCU for designing web app to recommend articles in real-estate domain
University award for academic excellence
University of Peradeniya Dec 2015
Award for academic excellence by the University

Projects

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All NLP Other
BERT-based approach for relation extraction using NLP - RelEx-BERT

BERT-based approach for relation extraction using NLP - RelEx-BERT

Explores using BERT contextualized embeddings into a simple feed-forward neural network.

Code
K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm (KNN) on Cuda

K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm (KNN) on Cuda

Developing KNN algorithm on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) using CUDA.

PDF
Deep learning based approach for relation extraction using NLP - RelEx (DL-based)

Deep learning based approach for relation extraction using NLP - RelEx (DL-based)

Determines the relation between two entities using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN).

Code
Machine learning based approach for Semantic Relation Extraction and Classification - SciREL

Machine learning based approach for Semantic Relation Extraction and Classification - SciREL

Feature-vector based, supervised machine learning approach to extract explicit semantic relations and classify them

Rule based approach for relation extraction using NLP - RelEx (Rule-based)

Rule based approach for relation extraction using NLP - RelEx (Rule-based)

Determines the relation between two entities utilizing the co-location information between them.

Code
Extracting Drug-Drug Interactions (DDI) interactions from bio-medical literature.

Extracting Drug-Drug Interactions (DDI) interactions from bio-medical literature.

Extracts interaction between drugs through a series of steps automatically using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.

Web service development

Web service development for the company CCCOM (Information Portal for National Construction Industry)

Recent & Upcoming Talks

A system for multi-class clinical relation extraction
Developing a system for multi-class clinical relation extraction
Mar 26, 2021 10:00 AM — Mar 27, 2021 11:30 AM Virtual
PDF
A system for multi-class clinical relation extraction
Extracting Adverse Drug Events from Clinical Notes
Exploring different approaches for ADE Extraction
Mar 25, 2021 10:00 AM — 11:30 AM Virtual
PDF Video
Extracting Adverse Drug Events from Clinical Notes
NLPatVCU CLEF 2020 - ChEMU Shared Task System Description
Exploring different approaches for ADE Extraction
Sep 22, 2020 10:00 AM — Sep 25, 2020 11:30 AM Greece
PDF Video
NLPatVCU CLEF 2020 - ChEMU Shared Task System Description
RelEx - A system for clinical relation extraction via Convolutional Neural Network
Exploring different approaches for ADE Extraction
Nov 16, 2019 10:00 AM — Nov 20, 2019 11:30 AM Washington, D.C
PDF
RelEx - A system for clinical relation extraction via Convolutional Neural Network

Recent Publications

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Darshini Mahendran, Bridget McInnes T (2021). Extracting Adverse Drug Events from Clinical Notes. American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Summits on Translational Science.

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Jiayuan He, Dat Quoc Nguyen, Saber A Akhondi, Christian Druckenbrodt, Camilo Thorne, Ralph Hoessel, Zubair Afzal, Zenan Zhai, Biaoyan Fang, Hiyori Yoshikawa, Darshini Mahendran, others (2020). An extended overview of the CLEF 2020 ChEMU Lab. Proceedings of the CLEF 2020 conference.

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Darshini Mahendran, Cora Lewis, Bridget T McInnes (2020). NLP@ VCU: Identifying adverse effects in English tweets for unbalanced data. Proceedings of the Fifth Social Media Mining for Health Applications Workshop & Shared Task.

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Darshini Mahendran, Gabrielle Gurdin, Nastassja Lewinski, Christina Tang, Bridget T McInnes (2020). NLPatVCU CLEF 2020 ChEMU Shared Task System Description. Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2020.

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Darshini Mahendran, Chathurika Brahmana, Bridget T McInnes (2018). SciREL at SemEval-2018 Task 7: A System for Semantic Relation Extraction and Classification. Proceedings of The 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation.

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