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Veeraruna Kavitha, Professor

Industrial Engineering and Operations Research                           
IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400 076, India

Email : vkavitha[AT]iitb.ac.in

Office: Room 103, First Floor, IEOR Building

Phone (Internal(O)) : (0091 22) - 2576 9417
Phone (Internal(R)) : (0091 22) - 2576 8417

Fax   : (0091 22) - 2572 6875  / (0091 22) - 2572 3480
 

Courses proposed and taught: IE 606,  IE 618, IE 711 and IE 807

Teaching /taught: IE 507,  IE 611,  IE 612, IE 614, IE 616,  IE 621,  IE 622, IE 630, IE 708,  IE 802 and IE 807

Post Doctoral Fellows

Past PhD Students

  • M Venkateswra Rao K
  • Ranbir Singh
  • Indrajit Saha
  • Vartika Singh
  • Shiksha Singhal
  • Khushboo Agarwal
  • Uday Kumar

Current PhD Students

Past MTech and MSc students

Current MTech and MSc Students

  • Nikhil Jaiswal
  • Omkar Mauraya
  • Sanju 

Academics

  • Doctorate (2007),  ECE Department, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.
  • MSc (Engg.) (2002), Indian Institute of Science, India.
  • B.E.  (1994), UVCE, Electronics,  Bangalore University, India India

Work Experience

  • Professor @ IEOR Department, IIT Bombay (1/03/2025 onwards)
  • Associate Professor @ IEOR Department, IIT Bombay (1/08/2019 to 1/3/2025)
  • Assistant Professor @ IEOR Department, IIT Bombay (15/5/2012 to 1/07/2019).
  • Principal  Research Scientist @ Mymo Wireless, Bangalore, India   (3/2012 - 05/2012).
  • Research Lead @ SRM Research Institute, Bangalore, India   (12/2011 - 2/2012).
  • Post Doctoral Fellow @ MAESTRO, INRIA  and LIA, University Avignon, France  (08/2008 - 11/2011).
  • Post Doctoral Fellow @ Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India (04/2007 - 07/2008)
  • Project Leader @ Accord Software and Systems Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, India (09/1994 - 07/2000)

Research Interests 

Stochastic processes, Performance analysis, Queuing theory,  Optimal control, Behavioral Games,  Dynamic Games, Cooprative Games,  Stochastic approximation, Markov decision processes, Wireless communications, Supply chains

Publications and Thesis

Recent Journals 

  1. Tushar Walunj, Veeraruna Kavitha, Jaya Krishnan Nair and Priyank Agarwal, "Strategic pricing and ranking in recommendation systems with seller competition"  Performance Evaluation, 2025  (recipient of Best student paper award at IFIP Performance 2025).
  2. Shankar Walunj, Tushar, Shiksha Singhal, Jayakrishnan Nair, and   Veeraruna Kavitha.  "On the Interplay Between Pricing, Competition and QoS in Ride-Hailing." Dynamic Games and Applications (2025): 1-55
  3. Dhiman, Madhu, Atul Maurya,   Veeraruna Kavitha, and Priyank Sinha. "Punitive policies to combat misreporting in dynamic supply chains." IEEE Control Systems Letters (2025)
  4. Agarwal, Khushboo, Konstantin Avrachenkov, Raghupati Vyas, and Veeraruna Kavitha. "Two Choice Behavioral Game Dynamics with Myopic-Rational and Herding Players." Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems (2025).
  5. Venkateswararao M. Koppisetti, and Veeraruna Kavitha. "Dynamic headway policies using minimal information to optimize bunching and waiting times", Public Transport 2025
  6. Agarwal, Khushboo, and Veeraruna Kavitha. "Total-current population-dependent branching processes: analysis via stochastic approximation." Stochastics (2024): 1-34.
  7. Vartika Singh and Veeraruna Kavitha. "Partial information games and competitive advertising". Dynamic Games and Applications. 2023.
  8. Vartika Singh and Veeraruna Kavitha. "Stochastic vaccination game among influencers, leader and public". Accepted at Dynamic Games and Applications. 2023.
  9. Khushboo Agarwal and  Veeraruna Kavitha "Robust fake-post detection against real-coloring adversaries",  Elsevier Performance Evaluation,  2023 (recipient of Best student paper award at IFIP Performance 2023).
  10. U. M. Kumar, Veeraruna Kavitha, S. P. Bhat and N. Hemachandra, "Optimal Markov Policies for Finite-Horizon Constrained MDPs With Combined Additive and Multiplicative Utilities," in IEEE Control Systems Letters, vol. 7, pp. 2029-2034, 2023, doi: 10.1109/LCSYS.2023.3283470.
  11. Uday Kumar, S.P. Bhat,  Veeraruna Kavitha and Nandyala Hemachandra 2023. Approximate solutions to constrained risk-sensitive Markov decision processes. European Journal of Operational Research 2023.
  12. Kiran Chaudary  Veeraruna Kavitha and Jayakrishnan Nair, "Dynamic scheduling in a partially fluid, partially lossy queueing system", ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems 2023
  13. Indrajit Saha and Veeraruna Kavitha "Systemic-Risk and Evolutionary Stable Strategies in a Financial Network",  Dynamic Games and Applications, 2023https://rdcu.be/c3zFz
  14. Dhounchak, Ranbir, Veeraruna Kavitha, and Eitan Altman. "Viral marketing branching processes." Computer Communications 198 (2023): 140-156.
  15. Indrajit Saha and Veeraruna Kavitha   "Random fixed points, systemic risk and resilience of heterogeneous financial network." Annals of Operations Research (2022): 1-51.
  16. Shiksha Singhal and Veeraruna Kavitha "Coalition Formation Resource Sharing Game in Networks",  Elsevier  Performance Evaluation.
  17. Suyog Kapsikar, Indrajit Saha,  Khushboo Agarwal,  Veeraruna Kavitha,  and  Quanyan Zhu,  "Controlling Fake News by Collective Tagging: A Branching Process Analysis". IEEE Control Systems Letters, 2020

Recent Conference Papers

  1. Tushar Walunj, Veeraruna Kavitha, Jaya Krishnan Nair and Priyank Agarwal, "Strategic pricing and ranking in recommendation systems with seller competition"   IFIP Performance 2025  (Best student paper award)
  2. Konstantin Avrachenkov, Kousik Das,   Veeraruna Kavitha , Vartika Singh, ``Stability of polling systems for a large class of Markovian switching policies'', Proceedings of the 2025 64th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.
  3. Konstantin Avrachenkov, Madhu Dhiman and Veeraruna Kavitha. ``Constrained Average-Reward Intermittently Observable MDPs''.   Proceedings of the 2025 64th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.
  4. Gurkirat Wadhwa, Akansh Verma,   Veeraruna Kavitha, and Priyank Sinha. ``Price equilibria with positive margins in loyal-strategic markets with discrete prices", Proceedings of the 2025 64th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.
  5. Dhiman, Madhu, Atul Maurya,   Veeraruna Kavitha, and Priyank Sinha. "Punitive policies to combat misreporting in dynamic supply chains."  Proceedings of the 2025 64th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.
  6. Gurkirat Wadhwa and  Veeraruna Kavitha,  "What should the encroaching supplier do in markets with some loyal
    customers? A Stackelberg Game Approach'', European Control Conference,  2025.
  7. Agarwal, Khushboo, Konstantin Avrachenkov, Raghupati Vyas, and Veeraruna Kavitha. "Two Choice Behavioral Game Dynamics with Myopic-Rational and Herding Players." Sigmetrics (2025).
  8. Khushboo Agarwal, Konstantin Avrachenkov,  Veeraruna Kavitha and Raghupati Vyas, "Balancing rationality and social influence: Alpha-rational Nash  equilibrium in games with herding", GAMENETS 2025.
  9. Riya Sultana and Veeraruna Kavitha, "Cooperate or Compete: Coalition Formation in Congestion Games", CDC 2024.
  10. Vartika Singh, and Veeraruna Kavitha. "Constrained Stochastic Games Including Risk-Sensitive Utility." 2024 American Control Conference (ACC). IEEE, 2024.
  11. Shiksha Singhal, Veeraruna Kavitha and V. Shankar, "Social Optimal Freshness in Multi-Source, Multi-Channel Systems via MDP," 2024 16th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS), Bengaluru, India, 2024.
  12. Gurkirat Wadwa, Tushar Shankar Walunj, and Veeraruna Kavitha, "Partition-form Cooperative Games in Two-Echelon Supply Chains" ICORES 2024, Rome, Italy.
  13. Khushboo Agarwal and  Veeraruna Kavitha "Robust fake-post detection against real-coloring adversaries",  IFIP Performance  2023 (Best student paper award).
  14. U. M. Kumar, Veeraruna Kavitha, S. P. Bhat and N. Hemachandra, "Optimal Markov Policies for Finite-Horizon Constrained MDPs With Combined Additive and Multiplicative Utilities," CDC 2023.
  15. Vartika Singh and  Veeraruna Kavitha, "Fixed-Point Equations Solving Risk-Sensitive MDP with Constraint ", 2023 American Control Conference (ACC).
  16. Khushboo Agarwal, and Veeraruna Kavitha, "Single-Out Fake Posts: Participation Game and Its Design", 2023 American Control Conference (ACC).
  17. Madhu Dhiman, Chen Peng, Veeraruna Kavitha  and Quanyan Zhu, "Integrative Modeling and Analysis of the Interplay between Epidemic and News Propagation Processes", 2023 American Control Conference (ACC).
  18. Tushar Shankar, Walunj, Tushar Shankar, Shiksha Singhal, Veeraruna Kavitha, and Jayakrishnan Nair,  "Pricing, competition and market segmentation in ride hailing." 2022 58th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton). IEEE, 2022.
  19. Singh, Vartika, and Veeraruna Kavitha. "Fair opportunistic schedulers for Lossy Polling systems." ITC 2022
  20. Singhal, Shiksha, Veeraruna Kavitha, and Sreenath Ramanath. "AoI-Based Opportunistic-Fair mmWave Schedulers." ITC 2022
  21. Agarwal, Khushboo, and Veeraruna Kavitha. "Saturated total-population dependent branching process and viral markets." CDC 2022
  22. Vartika Singh, Khushboo Agarwal, Shubham and Veeraruna Kavitha,  "Evolutionary Vaccination Games with premature vaccines to combat ongoing deadly pandemic" Valuetools 2021.
  23. Shiksha Singhal, Veeraruna Kavitha1 and Jayakrishnan Nair "Coalition formation in constant sum queueing games", CDC 2021
  24. Richa Dhingra, Hansraj Satyam Verma, Alexandre Reiffers-Masson and Veeraruna Kavitha "Multi-page Menu Recommendation in Cascade Model with Externalities", CDC 2021
  25. Khushboo Agarwal and Veeraruna Kavitha, "Co-Virality of Competing Content over OSNs?",  in Networking 2021
  26. Suyog Kapsikar, Indrajit Saha,  Khushboo Agarwal,   Veeraruna Kavitha,  &  Quanyan Zhu,  Controlling Fake News by Collective Tagging: A Branching Process Analysis, ACC 2021
  27. R. S. Prakash, N. Karamchandani, V. Kavitha and S. Moharir, "Partial Service Caching at the Edge," 2020 18th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOPT), Volos, Greece, 2020, pp. 1-8.
  28. Vartika Singh and Veeraruna Kavitha "Asymmetric Information Acquisition Games", CDC 2020
  29. Guanze Peng, Veeraruna Kavitha and Quanyan Zhu, “On Optimal Control of Discounted Cost Infinite-Horizon Markov Decision Processes Under Local State Information Structures” IFAC 2020.
  30. Indrajit Saha and Veeraruna Kavitha, "Financial replicator dynamics: emergence of systemic-risk-averting strategies", NetGCoop'2020
  31. M Venkateswararao K and Veeraruna Kavitha,"Dynamic Bus Dispatch Policies", NetGCoop'2020
  32. Veeraruna Kavitha and Eitan Altman, "Controlling Packet Drops to Improve Freshness of information", NetGCoop'2020

Thesis and Technical Reports 

  1. Veeraruna Kavitha, "Optimal Wireless Equalizers" Ph.D. Thesis, IISc, India, Dec 2006.