Samantha Thelijjagoda is a senior professor in Information Systems Engineering in the Faculty of Computing and currently serving as the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research & International) at Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT). He joined SLIIT in 2007 and held positions including Dean, SLIIT Business School, Dean, Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, Head, Department of Information Systems Engineering, Head, Department of Information Management, Postgraduate Course Coordinator at SLIIT and Course Leader for Enterprise Applications Development program of Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

He holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems Engineering from Gifu University, Japan. And earned an M.Eng. in Electronics and Computer Engineering from the same university. He received his first degree in Statistics (Special) with First Class Honours from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka.

He is an active member of Computer Society of Sri Lanka (CSSL) and also a member of the Institute of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE), USA. He is the country representative of Technical Committee 8 (TC-8: Information Systems) of International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP). He is also an accredited skills assessor for Skills Certifications of IT professionals in Sri Lanka which is done by Australian Computer Society (ACS). His research interests are Computational models of human language processing (NLP), Human language technology (HLT) such as Machine Translations, Information Extraction etc. and Digital linguistics (Corpus Linguistics) which are associated with the area of Computational Linguistics.