An Interview with Prof. Roshan Ragel – 2025 IEEE CS Mary Kenneth Keller Teaching Award Recipient
As the first academic from the Global South to win the IEEE CS Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award, Prof. Roshan Ragel exemplifies leadership in teaching, research, and digital transformation. A Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Peradeniya and Consultant CEO of LEARN, Sri Lanka’s National Research and Education Network, he has spearheaded efforts in AI policy, regional connectivity, and multidisciplinary academic innovation. We connected with Prof. Ragel to explore his impactful journey.
As the consulting CEO of LEARN, you’ve led significant enhancements to Sri Lanka’s education network. What were the key challenges and successes?
I’ve had the privilege of guiding LEARN since 2017, tackling obstacles like outdated infrastructure, fragmented policies, and limited national coordination. Many universities initially relied on isolated, ad‑hoc internet services. We focused on unifying standards, securing funding, and building stakeholder trust.
A critical test came in early 2020, when COVID‑19 forced rapid shifts to online learning. Fortunately, LEARN already ran pilot platforms, Zoom and Moodle, through workshops we held in 2019. When the lockdown began, we scaled quickly: we paused the system for a week, stress‑tested it, and relaunched it across 50+ member institutions, supporting up to 12,000 simultaneous classes and over 300 million minutes of usage per month . To ease the data burden on students, we collaborated with the government and telecoms to enable zero-rated access, allowing students to connect from home and access classes at no cost. These moves ensured nearly 90% of university students remained connected during lockdown.
Post‑COVID, our goal has been to embed hybrid learning, where online and in‑person teaching co‑exist. Today, LEARN supports all 16 public universities and many other higher education and research institutions. We’ve built resilient systems for education continuity, capacity building through workshops, and policies that support both infrastructure and pedagogical change. That blend of network stability, technical capacity, and policy buy‑in remains our formula for success.
You’ve played a central role in the Asi@Connect project. How has this shaped digital infrastructure and education in Sri Lanka and the region?
I joined Asi@Connect from the very beginning as a governor, then as a co-chair of the Steering Committee since 2021, and I have been serving as Chair since 2023. In these roles, I’ve helped guide technical strategy and oversee capacity-building activities across 22 countries. Asi@Connect brought regional NREN backbone connectivity to Sri Lanka, enabling our universities to participate in earth observation, climate, and disaster-response research collaborations.
Under my leadership, we trained local network teams and significantly enhanced Sri Lanka’s presence in Asia-Pacific research consortia. Asi@Connect isn’t just infrastructure, it’s a partnership, blending EU funding with local ownership to advance education and research across the region.
How do you see AI shaping Sri Lanka’s future, especially with LEARN’s efforts and your initiatives like the AI Forum for Academics?
AI offers transformative potential for Sri Lanka, but its success hinges on both policy and capacity. Within the national AI Steering Committee, I led the “Skills and Curricula” pillar, aligning university programs with cutting-edge AI needs. At LEARN, we engaged with the UNESCO Chair on Harnessing Innovations in Technology at the Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation. We organized Artificial Intelligence for Innovative Designs in Education (AIDE) training for hundreds of educators, training that has since cascaded across multiple institutions. Since then, we have been able to tap into grants from regional donors on various local and regional AI Literacy and Skills training programs for all pillars of higher education: academics, researchers, administrators, and students.
I also founded the AI Forum for Academics (AIFA) at Peradeniya, a national platform bringing faculty together to explore generative AI in teaching and research. Through AIFA, we host seminars and skill weeks that foster collaboration across schools like Engineering, Agriculture, Arts, and Medicine. Meanwhile, LEARN is working on building ethical guidelines and exploring infrastructure support such as HPC and cloud integration to ensure Sri Lanka can adopt AI thoughtfully and securely.
With over 200 publications and extensive mentorship, how do you foster a culture of research and innovation at Peradeniya?
Impactful research springs from collaboration across disciplines. At Peradeniya, I helped create the Multidisciplinary AI Research Centre (MARC) in 2024 to enable this. MARC brings together faculty and students from diverse fields, including Agriculture, Medicine, Engineering, and Humanities, into thematic centers like “Healthcare & Wellbeing” and “Education & Society.”
Within MARC’s Board, I helped strategize satellite groups that deliberately mix expertise, like veterinarians, dentists, agronomists, and engineers joining forces. We now routinely co-supervise PhDs, jointly apply for grants, and publish across domains. MARC has accelerated a mindset shift on campus, empowering researchers to tackle real-world challenges with diversified perspectives and AI-infused solutions.
As a two-year Board Member of APAN, what has that meant for regional collaboration and Sri Lanka?
Serving on the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) Board over the past two years has been a pivotal experience in elevating Sri Lanka’s role in regional research and education networking. At APAN56 in Colombo in 2023, I convened and coordinated the inaugural NREN Leaders Forum, which gathered C‑level executives from NRENs across Asia‑Pacific. The forum became a high-level strategic platform to tackle shared challenges, explore emerging technologies, and develop a collective vision for sustainable digital infrastructure .
Following that success, in 2024 at APAN57 in Thailand, we launched the AI & HPC Working Group (initially as a Birds-of-Feather session) led by one of my colleagues.
Through these initiatives, especially the NREN Leaders Forum and the AI/HPC WG, we’ve amplified Sri Lanka’s voice in strategic dialogue, unlocked regional training and support, and helped position APAN as a platform for innovation (for example, incubating the Working Group toward complete formation at APAN59) .
Back home, these efforts have translated into tangible advantages: LEARN’s engineers have accessed training in network security and AI infrastructure, we hosted APAN56 in Colombo, and Sri Lanka has been firmly visible as both a contributor and innovator in regional workshops and conferences. My role on the board isn’t just about representation, it’s about ensuring Sri Lanka actively shapes the future of research and education networks across Asia-Pacific.
Prof. Roshan Ragel’s journey illustrates how visionary leadership, cross-sector collaboration, and institutional capacity-building can transform national research ecosystems. His work across connectivity, AI education, university research, and regional networks embodies what the IEEE CS Mary Kenneth Keller Award stands for: advancing computing education in ways that resonate far beyond the classroom.
