Ph.D. (2006 - 2009)
My area of research was in Artificial Intelligence, particularly Multi-Agent Systems. My thesis is titled Self-Adapting Agent Organisations and deals with self-organisation in multi-agent systems to aid in the development of autonomic computing systems. In particular, it looks at how agents can locally and continuously adapt their structural relations in an organisation in order to improve the global performance of the system. The thesis is available here.My primary supervisor was Prof. Nicholas R. Jennings (second most highly cited researcher in the area of Artificial Intelligence) and Dr. Nicholas Gibbins was my second supervisor.
During this period, apart from my PhD work, I also collaborated on a research topic in Game Theory. Specifically, it focussed on developing game-theoretic approaches for decentralised dynamic task allocation and used the Robocup Rescue platform for evaluation. A publication resulting from this work was nominated for the prestigious Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award at AAMAS 2009 (top 5 out of 700+ submissions).
B.Tech. (2002 - 2006)
Apart from the usual courses of the curriculum, I specialised in the field of Multi-Agent Systems under the guidance of Prof. Kamal Karlapalem.My third year Honours project was on RoboCup Rescue. I developed and lead the university team Kshitij to win the 3rd position in the Rescue Simulation Agent League at RoboCup 2005, held at Osaka, Japan. This was IIIT Hyderabad's first ever participation in this league. Around 30 universities teams, from across the world, competed in the league
My Final year project (4th year) was on Large-scale Crowd Simulation. It led to the publication of two peer-reviewed papers in international workshops.
While at IIIT Hyderabad, I was the head of the organising committee for Threads, the annual technical college festival in 2005. And I also represented IIIT Hyderabad in ACM ICPC Asia regionals in the same year.