Delhi students to be published in international journal

Three former students of Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women have solved an important computer science problem and their research will soon be published by a reputed international journal. Aakriti Vasudeva reports.

Three former students of Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women have solved an important computer science problem and their research will soon be published by a reputed international journal.

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Ankita Sharma, Garima Khanna and Shubhangi Gupta took up the Reviewer Assignment Problem (RAP) as part of their final year B.Tech (Computer Science & Engineering) project in August 2011 and solved it in a year. Their research paper is titled 'A New Method for Reviewer Assignment Problem using Type-2 Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzy Functions' and has been accepted recently by the international journal Applied Intelligence, which is published by Springer.

This is the first time that any B.Tech student of the university has had work published in an international journal, said Devendra Tayal, Head of Department, Centre for Science and Environment and the girls' guide. "It is a matter of great pride for us. Their paper was under rigorous review for 13 months by three reviewers and was finally accepted in May," he added.

RAP is a problem faced by large funding agencies and academic journals in selecting a reviewer with relevant expertise to assess a proposal or research paper.

Explaining the problem, Tayal said, "There are many funding agencies which award thousands of crores of rupees to projects. It is difficult for them to find the right breed of reviewers since any project has a mix of different subjects."

Existing solutions are not very efficient because either people do it manually or the expertise of the reviewer does not closely match the project, said Sharma.

"Our solution is optimal because it increases the match to closest possible as well as the speed at which this is done and is based on a mathematical model."

Elaborating on why they took up this particular topic, Sharma said, "It struck us as ironical that we were attempting to do research but the most common problem in research since ages, the RAP, had still not been suitably resolved.