Arabinda Tripathy is a retired Professor from the Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur. He had also served as the Dean of the school. He obtained his PhD in Operations Research from the London School of Economics. His areas of specialization include operations management, operations research, quantitative techniques and project management. Prof. Tripathy moved to academics after working in the industry for over 12 years, and he taught at IIM Ahmedabad for nearly 25 years. He also launched a master’s level course and taught at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He was the Founder Director of the Institute of Petroleum Management, Gandhinagar, and the L&T Institute of Project Management, Vadodara, India. Prof. Tripathy has published several research papers in various respected national and international journals. He served as President of the Operations Research Society of India (ORSI), and as Editor-in-Chief of ORSI’s journal OPSEARCH. He also servedas Editor of Developing Countries Newsletter of IFORS. He received the IFORS Developing Countries Award and EFMD Fellowship at the London Business School. With extensive experience in various industries and institutions, spanning over four decades, and his ability to apply academic insights to real-world problem solving in energy, utilities, project management cutting across continents, make him a much sought after expert.Rabi Narayan Subudhi is a Professor of Management at KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, India and has over 30 years’ teaching experience. He has also served as a Professor of Management at Berhampur University Odisha, and VIT Vellore. He is the President of ORSI Bhubaneswar (Odisha) chapter. After gaining Masters and M.Phil. degrees in Statistics, he completed his PhD (in Management), with a senior fellowship from CSIR. He is also an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, where he was awarded FDPM. He has published five books and over 50 research papers, and also regularly writes articles for popular regional newspapers. He has presented papers at international conferences in the USA, UK, Australia, Singapore, Bhutan and India. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of applied business statistics, research methodology, and quality management database system.Srikanta Patnaik is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, SOA University, Bhubaneswar, India. He obtained his PhD in Machine Intelligence from Jadavpur University and has been researching in the areas of machine intelligence, soft computing applications and re-engineering. Prof. Patnaik has published 60 research papers in international journals and conference proceedings. He is the author of 2 textbooks and has edited 12 books and has written invited book chapters, published by leading international publishers like Springer-Verlag and Kluwer Academic. Prof. Patnaik was the Principal Investigator of the AICTE sponsored TAPTEC project “Building Cognition for Intelligent Robot” and UGC sponsored Major Research Project “Machine Learning and Perception using Cognition Methods”. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Information and Communication Technology and International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics published by Inderscience Publishing House, England and also Editor-in-Chief of book series “Modeling and Optimization in Science and Technology” published by Springer, Germany. Jyoti Ranjan Nayak is Associate Professor of Mathematics at the Faculty of Science and Technology, IFHE, Hyderabad, India. Prior to this, he was Associate Professor at ITER, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan University, Bhubaneswar, India, and has more than 27 years of teaching experience. He obtained his PhD from Utkal University. His research areas include non-convex programming, fuzzy optimization, optimal control and topology optimization. He has published 10 papers inleading national and international journals. He has taught engineering mathematics and optimization techniques at undergraduate and postgraduate level. He is also former Associate Editor of the Journal of Orissa Mathematical Society. Currently he is the Vice-President of the Operational Research Society of India-Bhubaneswar Chapter.
