Bridging Research and Deployment: Security, Data Spaces, and Trustworthy AI

Dr. Tharindu Ranathunga is a researcher and systems architect specializing in trustworthy AI, decentralised architectures, and cyber-physical systems security. With over seven years of experience across academia and industry, he combines rigorous research with hands-on engineering to design and deploy secure, standards-aligned digital infrastructures.

Currently a Senior Researcher at the Nimbus Research Centre in Ireland, he has led the technical design and delivery of national and European-funded projects focused on data spaces, distributed ledger technologies (DLT), federated learning, and cyber-resilient IoT ecosystems. His work has contributed to industry-facing testbeds and high-TRL deployments across manufacturing, energy, finance, and critical infrastructure domains. He collaborates closely with industry stakeholders to align research innovations with emerging standards for secure and sovereign data sharing.

His expertise spans blockchain-based trust frameworks, decentralised and federated machine learning, zero-trust architectures, semantic interoperability, and secure edge-cloud orchestration. With a strong systems engineering mindset, he works across the full stack from protocol and governance design to secure data exchange, model lifecycle management, CI/CD standardisation, and scalable deployment.

His doctoral research introduced a novel DLT-based trust framework for IoT ecosystems, addressing long-standing challenges in veracity, autonomy, and decentralised trust management in distributed environments.

More recently, his work extends into local large language model (LLM) inferencing and secure agentic system design, with a focus on privacy-preserving AI deployment and resilient, compliance-aware autonomous systems. His research aims to ensure that advanced AI technologies remain trustworthy, interoperable, and human-centric.

Across all his work, Dr. Ranathunga bridges applied research and real-world implementation, ensuring that complex distributed systems are not only innovative, but scalable, secure, and operationally viable. He is also an active supporter of open-source initiatives and provides mentorship to emerging researchers and engineers building the next generation of secure digital ecosystems.