Name Suran Goonatilake | Role Entrepreneur | |
 | ||
Alma mater Royal College Colombo
University College London
University of Sussex Education University College London, Royal College, Colombo, University of Sussex | ||
Suran Goonatilake, OBE is a Sri Lankan born British academic, entrepreneur and producer. He is a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL), with research activities in 'deep tech': artificial intelligence, machine learning, machine vision, robotics, and body-scanning.
Contents
As a PhD student at UCL, Goonatilake, with three fellow students, co-founded a machine-learning company called Searchspace (renamed Fortent and then acquired by Actimize) whose software is used by banks and the stock exchanges around the world. In May 2005 Searchspace was acquired by Warburg Pincus, a buy-out fund.
He is the co-founder of Bodymetrics, a company that grew out of body-scanning research at UCL and Kurv, a multi-touch interface, which can either be used as a musical instrument or a controller for VR and AR. Goonatilake is also the co-editor of two books, Intelligent Systems in Finance and Business and Intelligent Hybrid Systems.
Goonatilake did his undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex in Computing and Artificial Intelligence.
In 2005, he was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's birthday honours list for his services to Entrepreneurship.
Scientific Entrepreneurship
Alongside his business ventures, Goonatilake was a founding Director of the Centre for Scientific Enterprise in 1999. A joint venture with the London Business School, it aimed to bring together and support young academics in the fields of scientific entrepreneurship.
Fashion
Goonatilake also co-founded the Centre for Fashion Enterprise, a non-profit initiative that finances and nurtures high-growth fashion designers in London. This initiative pioneered a new model of building luxury fashion companies and drew upon practises from technology start-ups, film and music industries. Famous alumni include Erdem, Manish Arora, and JW Anderson.
Film and TV
Goonatilake was an executive producer of the film Scenes of a Sexual Nature in 2006 directed by Ed Blum starring Ewan McGregor and Tom Hardy. This film was distributed independently viaThe Really Honest Little Distribution Company and premiered as the closing film to the London Raindance Film Festival that year. In 2007 Goonatilake was also the executive producer for the TV series Luxury Unveiled. Luxury Unveiled was broadcast globally on 50 channels and each episode focused on the heritage and appeal of different iconic brands: Chanel, Cartier, Dunhill, Tiffany, Mont Blanc and Ermenegildo Zegna.
Publications
Intelligent Systems for Finance and Business was co-edited with UCL Professor Philip Treleaven. Published in 1995 (Wiley) the book accumulates a comprehensive survey of the application of intelligent techniques in finance and business. Such computing techniques have since been applied in stock market predictions. The relative merits of the different techniques for financial and economic modeling are discussed, and a comprehensive survey of current applications is carried out.
Intelligent Hybrid Systems also published in 1995 (Wiley) was co-edited by Goonatilake. This book looks across the globe in realising the necessity of hybrid systems to solve complex problems.