Suran Goonatilake

Suran Goonatilake
Born	Colombo, Sri Lanka
Alma mater	Royal College Colombo University of Sussex University College London

Suran Goonatilake, OBE is an academic, entrepreneur and producer. He is a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL).[1]

Background

He did his undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex in Computing and Artificial Intelligence, followed by a PhD at University College London (UCL) in Machine Learning.

As a student at UCL, Goonatilake, co-founded with three fellow students, a Machine Learning company called Searchspace.[2]^[non-primary source needed] In May 2005 Searchspace was acquired by Warburg Pincus.

He is the co-founder of several Deep Tech companies, many of which are the result of commercialising research from British Universities [3]

Entrepreneurship

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.[4]

Fashion

He founded the Centre for Fashion Enterprise[5] in London a non-profit initiative that finances and nurtures high-growth fashion designers in London.[6] This initiative pioneered a new model of building luxury fashion companies and drew upon practises from technology start-ups, film and music industries.[7] Famous alumni include Erdem Moralıoğlu, Marios Schwab,[8] Mary Katrantzou, Manish Arora, and JW Anderson.

Film and TV

In 2006, Goonatilake was an executive producer on the romantic comedy, Scenes of a Sexual Nature, directed by Ed Blum and starring Ewan McGregor and Tom Hardy.[9] The film was distributed independently via The Really Honest Little Distribution Company [10] and premiered as the closing film to the 2006 London Raindance Film Festival.[11]

In 2007 he was the executive producer for Luxury Unveiled,[12][13] a documentary TV series on the world's top fashion and luxury brands including Chanel, Tiffany, Dunhill and Cartier.

Publications

Goonatilake is a co-editor of two books,

• Intelligent Systems for Finance and Business John Wiley & Sons 1995 ISBN 978-0471944041
• co-edited with Philip Treleaven Intelligent Hybrid Systems John Wiley & Sons 1995 ISBN 978-0471942429

References

1. "Suran Goonatilake". www.cs.ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 2017-06-22.
2. "News". www.businesswire.com (Press release).
3. Pathak, Shareen (2012-07-05). "Creativity 50:Suran Goonatilake, CEO, Bodymetrics". Ad Age. Retrieved 2017-06-22.
4. "'Doing things that cannot be done'". www.sundaytimes.lk. Retrieved 2017-11-23.
5. "Centre for Fashion Enterprise". fashion-enterprise.com. Archived from the original on June 25, 2003.
6. Foroohar, Rana (2005-07-24), "No-profit zone", Newsweek, retrieved 2017-11-23
7. Goonatilake, Suran (24 September 2007). "Why can't fashion be more like the music business?". Financial Times (North American edition) – via ResearchGate.
8. "Marios Schwab | SHOWstudio". showstudio.com.
9. "Scenes of a Sexual Nature", British Films Directory, British Council, 2006-11-09, retrieved 2017-11-23
10. "Tin Pan Films". Retrieved 2017-06-22.
11. Bellos, Alex (2006-10-13). "Did you say minimum wage?". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2017-06-16.
12. "Luxury Unveiled Episodes | TVGuide.com". www.tvguide.com. Archived from the original on 2017-03-24.
13. "Luxury Unveiled". May 19, 2006 – via IMDb.