&ldquo;IIT Jodhpur is committed to impart quality education to facilitate the creation of qualified, competent and responsible human resources to meet the emerging technological challenges of the world. It is working towards creating an equitable learning platform that is positive, accessible and effective in the face of the modern societal and scientific advancements.

Flexibility in curriculum, in all its academic programs, encompassing elements of teaching, research, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship is the most unique feature of IIT Jodhpur. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the National Mission on Cyber Physical Systems, has identified IIT Jodhpur as a Technology &amp; Innovation Hub in the area of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The institute has also been nominated as the coordinator for the Jodhpur City and Knowledge Cluster by the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India.

The sprawling 852-acre IIT Jodhpur campus is a majestic tribute to the deep-rooted diverse cultural heritage of the region. The campus is an architectural masterpiece, which is slated to become an international exemplar of sustainability with net-zero energy, and advanced water and waste management strategies.&rdquo;

IIT Jodhpur

In this paper, we address the problem of maximizing the influence in a social network by hiring a few users in the network to propagate the information. Considering limited budget and time, hired users (seeds) are activated dynamically at different time intervals over a time horizon. This motivates to avoid the same seed activation in consecutive time intervals that leads to deteriorating the seeds’ efficiency. The aim of this paper is to maximize the total gain obtained in the process of maximizing the influence in a social network. Total gain is obtained by earning of influencing the customers and then deducting the cost incurred for influencing the users. Therefore, an improvised memetic algorithm is developed to find the seeds that are to be activated at different time intervals to maximize the gain. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and it is found to perform better in identifying the potential seeds with minimum expenditure. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

School of Management & Entrepreneurship

World University root node

International Journal of Information Management

Exploring the effect of dynamic seed activation in social networks

Marketing companies explore several strategies with a fundamental goal of increasing sales; one such popular emerging strategy is Social Media Marketing. People are more likely to adopt a product recommended received from their acquaintances or based on product reviews. In this regard, a mixed influence model is used for studying the effect of comments on a product post. Also, a Greedy discounting technique targeting potential customers with an objective to maximize revenue as well as increase the social contagion. Here, we aim to increase the influence on people by offering the product for free to potential buyers who are capable of influencing more people and then the product is offered at increasing price, i.e., decreasing discount rates and increasing the revenue as well as the growth of the influence among customers’ acquaintances. Computational experiments are conducted on real-world networks representing different scenarios with varying complexities and tested the effectiveness of these algorithms. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

Estimation and maximization of user influence in social networks

The value of perishable products is most affected by the time delays in a supply chain. A major issue is how to integrate the existing practices in production, inventory holding and distribution, besides considering the perishable nature of the products, so as to deliver an optimised policy for the perishable commodities. Standard inventory control models are often not adequate for perishable products and there is a need for a new integrated model to focus on consolidation of production, inventory and distribution processes. We develop such a mathematical model to search for an optimal integrated inventory policy for perishable items in a multi-stage supply chain. We specifically assume the exponential deterioration rate so as to be consistent with the growth rate of the micro-organisms responsible for deterioration. We propose and analyse some general properties of the model and apply it to a three-stage supply chain. We show that this integrated model which includes inventory control and fleet selection can be optimised with an evolutionary technique like genetic algorithm. A novel genetic algorithm that avoids revisits and employs a parameter-less self-adaptive mutation operator is developed. The results are compared with those obtained with CPLEX for small-sized problems. We show that our model and optimisation approach gives near optimal results for varied demand scenarios. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.