Visakan Kadirkamanathan (born 1962, age 64, Jaffna) is a professor of Signal and Information Processing at the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He completed "Sequential learning in artificial neural networks" in 1992 at the University of Cambridge. From April 2009 to August 2014, he was Head of the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering.^[2] He is the director of the Rolls-Royce supported University Technology Centre in Control, Monitoring and Systems Engineering and is a founding member of the University Centre for Signal Processing and Complex Systems.^[1] Kadirkamanathan is known for his contribution to the field of statistical signal processing applied to system identification, signal estimation, and fault detection, and serves as the Co-editor of the International Journal of Systems Science.^[3]

Kadirkamanathan was born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and is one of six children. He completed his school education in Jaffna at St John's College Jaffna before moving to the United Kingdom to pursue an engineering education. At Christ's College, Cambridge University, he received both his graduate degree in Electrical and Information Sciences and his Ph.D. in Information Engineering.

In 1993, he joined the University of Sheffield as a lecturer in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering.^[2] He was subsequently promoted to senior lecturer, then reader, and finally became a professor in 2007. From April 2009 to August 2014, he served as the Head of Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering.^[2] Kadirkamanathan's primary area of research is in the field of signal and information processing, including signal estimation and fault detection. He also works in the area of autonomous systems and swarm intelligence.

Selected books include Functional Adaptive Control: An Intelligent Systems Approach by S. G. Fabri and V. Kadirkamanathan, published by Springer in 2001 (ISBN 978-1852334383). Another publication is Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics: 4th IAPR International Conference, PRIB 2009, Sheffield, UK, September 7–9, 2009, Proceedings, by V. Kadirkamanathan, G. Sanguinetti, M. Girolami, and M. Niranjan, published by Springer (ISBN 978-3642040306).