IEOR department is very happy to announce that three of its research scholars have been awarded the prestigious PMRF fellowship. Khushboo Agarwal, Shiksha Singhal and Vartika Singh have been found worthy of the honour this year.
The Prime Minister's Research Fellows (PMRF) Scheme aims at improving the quality of research in various higher educational institutions in the country. With attractive fellowships, the scheme seeks to attract the best talent into research thereby realizing the vision of development through innovation. The candidates are selected through a rigorous selection process and their performance is reviewed suitably through a national convention.
Khushboo Agarwal has been working on 'Competitive Branching Processes and its Applications'. Vartika Singh has her research in the field of 'Partial Information Games', whereas Shiksha is interested in 'Co-operative Game Theory'. These research works are been supervised by Prof. Veeraruna Kavitha.
Khushboo is specifically working on two problems related to content propagation over online social networks (OSNs). The first problem is motivated by viral competing markets, where the main objective is to understand if posts from multiple content providers (with different levels of market share, influence and capacity) co-exist over the network. Towards this, she introduce and study a new variety of branching process, called “Competitive branching processes”. The second problem is driven by the urgent need to curb the fake news, without significantly affecting the spread of real news over OSNs. Here, they leverage users’ inherent capabilities of identifying fake news and propose a warning-based control mechanism to mitigate this spread.
Shiksha's work is in the field of cooperative game theory and queuing theory. Currently, she is working on two problems both of which focus on finding the equilibrium-partition of agents. In the first problem, a common resource is to be shared amongst several agents using concepts of coalition formation in partition form games. This game finds applications in online auctions and communication networks, etc. The other problem considers a queuing system where the service providers loses any customer if all the servers are busy and their payoff increases with the number of customers served per unit of time. Concepts from the queuing theory and the previous problem are being used to understand the behaviour of players.
Vartika is working in the field of partial information games, specifically on acquisition games with partial asymmetric and non-classical information. Her approach is to use the tools of Markov Decision Process and Optimal control theory in order to derive the equilibrium policies for these games. The applications include competition over social networks, i.e., the content providers compete among each other to win as many customers as possible, problem of winning a project with deliverables, Blockchain etc. Basically it can capture any competition, where competition is expensive and opportunities are limited.
IEOR congratulates the students and wishes them best for their research journey.