Soft Computing for Problem Solving. Proceedings of SocProS 2020, Volume 1.

Dr. Aruna Tiwari is Associate Professor in Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Indore, India.  Her all degrees B.Tech., M.Tech., Ph.D. are in Computer Science & Engineering from SGSITS Indore. She has more than 20 years of research experience in the areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and soft-computing. Her work is around artificial neural networks, fuzzy clustering, evolutionary computation and their applications to bioinformatics, and medical diagnosis. Her research directions are toward the design of intelligent computing algorithms for classification, clustering, and feature selection which can handle big data. She has more than 30 journal publications of international repute including more than 5 IEEE transactions and Elsevier journals of high impact factor and has published more than fifty research articles in the ranked conferences.  She has established a big data handling lab in IIT Indore which is funded by Council of Science & Industrial Research (CSIR) Government of India in 2017.  She has enabled two MOUs, collaborating with Indian Institute of Soybean Research, Indore, and CSIR-Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute, Pilani.  She has recently initiated a consortium project on Artificial Intelligence which is approved from Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) Government of India. There are seven PhDs and more than 25 masters awarded under her guidance. Dr. Kapil Ahuja holds master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science (from Virginia Tech, USA) and has a strong interdisciplinary focus. After graduating earlier this decade from VT, he received his postdoctoral training from the Max Planck Institute in Magdeburg (Germany). Since then, he has established his independent research program in Mathematics of Data Science and Computational Science at IIT Indore, where he is currently working as Associate Professor. Dr. Ahuja is solving challenging problems that are at both the ends of the research spectrum, i.e., theoretical as well as applicable. His core research interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning, numerical methods, and optimization. He believes that it is necessary to collaborate globally to solve challenging research problems. Hence, he has multiple active international research collaborations (USA, Germany, India, France, and UK). In the recent past, he has also held visiting professor positions at TU Braunschweig (Germany), TU Dresden (Germany), and Sandia National Labs (USA). Dr. Ahuja's overall research output includes thirty publications (including eighteen in reputed journals) as well as external funding worth more than half-a-million USD from twelve projects. While achieving this, he has graduated two Ph.D. students with three more to graduate soon. Since teaching and service are essential for a fruitful and satisfying research career, he is very committed to these aspects as well. Dr. Ahuja has received the Best Teacher Award four times at IIT Indore. In the past, he has held many administrative positions. Since the past three years, he is heading International Affairs at IIT Indore as Founding Dean for the same. Dr. Anupam Yadav is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Dr. BR Ambedkar National Institute of Technology Jalandhar, India. His research area includes numerical optimization, soft computing, and artificial intelligence, he has more than ten years of research experience in the areas of soft computing and optimization. Dr. Yadav has done Ph.D. in soft computing from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, and he worked as Research Professor at Korea University. He has published more than twenty-five research articles in journals of international repute and has published more than fifteen research articles in conference proceedings. Dr. Yadav has authored a text book entitled “An introduction to neural network methods for differential equations”. He has edited three books which are published by AISC, Springer Series. Dr. Yadav was General Chair, Convener, and Member of steering committee of several international conferences. He is Associate Editor in the journal of the experimental and theoretical artificial intelligence. Dr. Yadav is Member of various research societies. Dr. Jagdish Chand Bansal is Associate Professor at South Asian University, New Delhi, and Visiting Faculty at Maths and Computer Science, Liverpool Hope University, UK. Dr. Bansal has obtained his Ph.D. in Mathematics from IIT Roorkee. Before joining SAU, New Delhi, he has worked as Assistant Professor at ABV Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Gwalior and BITS Pilani. His primary area of interest is swarm intelligence and nature-inspired optimization techniques. Recently, he proposed a fission–fusion social structure-based optimization algorithm, spider monkey optimization (SMO), which is being applied to various problems from engineering domain. He has published more than 60 research papers in various international journals/conferences. He is Series Editor of the book series such as Algorithms for Intelligent Systems (AIS) and Studies in Autonomic, Data-driven and Industrial Computing (SADIC) published by Springer. He is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Swarm Intelligence (IJSI) published by Inderscience. He is also Associate Editor of IEEE ACESSS published by IEEE and ARRAY published by Elsevier. He is Steering Committee Member and General Chair of the annual conference series SocProS. He is General Secretary of Soft Computing Research Society (SCRS). He has also received Gold Medal at UG and PG level. Prof. Kusum Deep is Full Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India, and Visiting Professor, Liverpool Hope University, UK, and University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She has completed her B.Sc. (Hons) and M.Sc. (Hons) from Centre for Advanced Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. She is an M.Phil. Gold Medalist. She earned her Ph.D. from UoR (now IIT Roorkee) in 1988. She has been a national scholarship holder and a postdoctoral from Loughborough University, UK assisted by International Bursary funded by Commission of European Communities, Brussels. She has won numerous awards like Khosla Research Award, UGC Career Award Starred Performer of IITR Faculty, many best paper awards by Railway Bulletin of Indian Railways, special facilitation in memory of late Professor M. C. Puri, and AIAP Excellence Award. She has authored two books, supervised 20 Ph.Ds, and published 125 research papers. She is Senior Member of IEEE, ORSI, CSI, IMS, and ISIM. She is Executive Editor of International Journal of Swarm Intelligence, Inderscience. She is Associate Editor of Swarm and Evolutionary Algorithms, Elsevier. She is on the editorial board of many journals. She is Founder President of Soft Computing Research Society, India. She is General Chair of series of International Conference on Soft Computing for Problems Solving (SocProS). Her research interests are evolutionary algorithms, swarm Iitelligence, and nature-inspired optimization techniques and their applications. Prof. Atulya K. Nagar holds Foundation Chair as Professor of Mathematical Sciences and is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Liverpool Hope University, United Kingdom. He has been Dean of the Faculty of Science and Head of the School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering which he established at the University. He received a prestigious Commonwealth Fellowship for pursuing his doctorate (D.Phil.) in Applied Nonlinear Mathematics, which he earned from the University of York (UK) in 1996. He holds B.Sc. (Hons), M.Sc. (Mathematics), and M.Phil. (with distinction) in Mathematical Physics from the MDS University of Ajmer, India. Prior to joining Liverpool Hope, he was at the Department of Mathematical Sciences and later at the Department of Systems Engineering, at Brunel University, London. He is internationally respected Scholar working at the cutting edge of theoretical computer science, applied mathematical analysis, and systems engineering with his research expertise spanning both applied mathematics and computational methods for nonlinear, complex, and intractable problems arising in science, engineering, and industry. He has edited volumes on Intelligent System, and Applied Mathematics. He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing (IJAISC) and serves on editorial boards for a number of prestigious journals. He is well published with over 450 publications in prestigious publishing outlets. Professor Nagar sits on a number of strategic UK wide research bodies including the JISC Research Strategy group, and he is Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (FIMA) and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).