Author: Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam Suganthan

Dr Kedar Nath Das is currently working as Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, NIT Silchar, Assam. He qualified the GATE examination and was awarded his Ph. D. degree from IIT Roorkee in the year 2008. His area of research interest includes operations research, evolutionary optimization techniques, networking optimization and multi-objective optimization. As of now, he has over 50 research papers to his credit including papers in international journals of repute, which has around 400 Google scholar citations till date. There is 1 books and 3 book chapters to his credit. He has already guided 5 Ph. D. scholars, and recently 4 are working under him. Also, he has successfully guided about 6 M. Sc. projects and 2 undergraduate internships. He has visited around 11 foreign countries (including Las Vegas, USA; London, UK; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Bangkok, Thailand; Singapore;  Dubai; Kuching, Malaysia; Bratislava; Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Liverpool, UK; Wales, UK) and delivered about 35 expert lectures at different institutions of repute, in India. As coordinator, he has organized 12 events including STTP, international conference, workshops and self-financed courses. He has already reviewed more than 100 research papers. He is the life member of Operational Research Society of India (ORSI), The Indian Society for Technical Education (ISTE), Odisha Mathematical Society (OMS) and member of IEEE. He has been recently awarded ‘Slovak National Scholarship’ in the year 2019. He also acts as Investigator to a project, Government of India. Dr. Debasish Das is presently working as Head of the Department in the Department of Civil Engineering, JIS College of Engineering (JISCE), Kalyani, West Bengal. Prior to joining JISCE, he worked as Assistant Professor and Head of the Department in the Department of Civil Engineering, Siliguri Institute of Technology, Siliguri. He has completed his Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering from National Institute of Technology Silchar, India; Master of Technology (M-Tech) in Transportation Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Silchar, India, and Bachelor of Technology (B-Tech) in Civil Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Durgapur. He has published more than 20 research papers in reputed international journals/conferences in the field of traffic engineering and transportation planning. His current research includes traffic engineering, transportation demand modelling, effect of COVID-19 on mode choice, effect of e-rickshaw in environmental pollution, plastic waste management, etc. He is a continuous reviewer of many reputed national/international journals. He also entitled with a project from WB-DST&BT, Government of West Bengal. He was participating in many international conferences as organizing member, session chair and member in technical programme committee. Dr. Anjan Kumar Ray is now working as Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department at NIT Sikkim, India. He has obtained his Ph.D. degree from IIT Kanpur. He was observed as a research associate at University of Ulster, UK. He has been posted as senior project engineer at IIT Kanpur and has been a visiting research scholar at University of Texas at San Antonio, USA. He is now the Dean of Research and Consultancy at NIT Sikkim. Along with, he has shouldered many administrative responsibility in his parent institution, like Senate Member, FIC Control Systems Laboratory, Chairperson, Innovation Cell, Start-up Cell Coordinator, FIC Library, Warden of Hostel (Admin). He has been working as Ho D In-charge, EEE Department and FIC ICTI. He has completed one project under TEQIP-III, and one more Meit Y project is ongoing. To his credit, he has awarded one Ph. D. scholar and more three are ongoing. He published 14 journal papers and 4 book chapters. He has been invited at the Rashtrapati Bhavan (President Office), India, for Festival of Innovation and Entrepreneurship 2018 to represent NIT Sikkim for project display and interaction with exhibitor groups with innovation clubs in March 2018. In addition, he acted as a reviewer and technical programme committee member of a number of journals and conferences. Dr Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam Suganthan is now working as an associate professor in the School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, NTU, Singapore. He  finished schooling at Union College (Tellippalai, Jaffna) and subsequently received the B.A. degree, Postgraduate Certificate and M.A. degree in Electrical and Information Engineering from the University of Cambridge, UK in 1990, 1992 and 1994, respectively. He received an honorary doctorate (i.e. Doctor Honoris Causa) in 2020 from University of Maribor, Slovenia. After completing his Ph.D. research in 1995, he served as Pre-doctoral Research Assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Sydney, in 1995–96 and a lecturer in the Department  of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland in 1996–99. He moved to Singapore in 1999. He was Editorial Board Member of the Evolutionary Computation Journal, MIT Press (2013–2018) and Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans on Cybernetics (2012–2018). He is Associate Editor of Applied Soft Computing (Elsevier, 2018- ), Neurocomputing (Elsevier, 2018- ), IEEE Trans on Evolutionary Computation (2005 – ), Information Sciences (Elsevier, 2009 – ), Pattern Recognition (Elsevier, 2001 – ) and IEEE Trans. on SMC: Systems (2020 – ). He is a founding co-editor-in-chief of Swarm and Evolutionary Computation (2010 – ), an SCI Indexed Elsevier Journal. His co-authored Sa DE paper (published in April 2009) won the “IEEE Trans. on Evolutionary Computation outstanding paper award” in 2012. His former Ph.D. student, Dr Jane Jing Liang, won the IEEE CIS Outstanding Ph.D. dissertation award, in 2014. IEEE CIS Singapore Chapter won the best chapter award in Singapore in 2014 for its achievementsin 2013 under his leadership. His research interests include swarm and evolutionary algorithms, pattern recognition, forecasting, randomized neural networks, deep learning and applications of swarm, evolutionary and machine learning algorithms. His publications have been well cited (Googlescholar Citations: ~45k). He was selected as one of the highly cited researchers by Thomson Reuters every year from 2015 to 2020 in computer science. He is ranked worldwide 300-400 among all computer science and electronics researchers (also include some control and communication engineering researchers) with public Google Scholar profiles. He served as General Chair of the IEEE SSCI 2013. He is an IEEE CIS distinguished lecturer (DLP) in 2018–2021. He has been a member of the IEEE (S”91, M”92, SM”00, Fellow’15) since 1991 and an elected Ad Com member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) in 2014–2016.