Nimesha Ranasinghe
Nimesha Ranasinghe is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maine and Co-founder of FlaVR Labs Inc. Dr. Ranasinghe’s research interests include Multisensory Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, and Augmented and Virtual Reality. Nimesha is particularly interested in exploring the concept of ‘Flavor Interfaces,’ where computational techniques are applied to augment traditional human-food interactions. He is well-known for his Digital Taste (a.k.a. Virtual Flavors) and Virtual Cocktail (Vocktail) inventions. He has been featured in numerous media worldwide, including New Scientist, New York Times, Time Magazine, BBC Radio, Discovery Channel, and Reuters. Furthermore, he has published his work in several prestigious academic conferences and journals, including the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), the ACM conference on Multimedia, and the Journal of Human-Computer Studies. In addition, he has received numerous awards for his research works; in 2014, his work on Digital Lollipop was selected as one of the ten best innovations in the world by the netexplo forum at the UNESCO HQ, Paris.