Dr. Ram Kumar Dhurkari joined the institute in June 2019 in the area of Information Technology and Systems. Dr. Ram has been associated with some of India's top management and technical institutes for 18 years (including his Ph.D. tenure). His teaching philosophy is driven by linking theory and practice at the audience level. Dr. Ram feels that an academician is the only person who can bridge the gap between theory and practice. During his academic career, he has developed a critical understanding of classroom teaching and delivery through his own courses. “In my academic career, I have observed that the postgraduate level participants feel as if they know everything. But this can be challenged by bringing the “WOW” effect inside the classroom, which creates a greater impact on participants’ thinking and learning. At the end of each session, I try to make the participant feel Oh! This is also possible. This can also happen. I never thought that way. This requires bringing unique case problems for discussion inside the classroom in which one aspect of the context is easily visible and acceptable, but the other aspect is rarely given a thought.” says Dr. Ram.
Data is fuel to machines
Crunching structured and unstructured data to surface hidden patterns and knowledge is his hobby. A few of his research projects are in the areas of improving the capabilities of machine learning techniques. “Data excites me because data themselves speaks a lot about the theory, phenomenon, mechanisms, and behaviors”, says Dr. Ram.
The Black Box of Human Decision-Making Processes
Dr. Ram’s primary research area is in the field of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) where he is continuously working on improving the resemblance between the prescriptions of multi-criteria decision-making methods to a decision-maker and the actual decisions made by the very same decision-maker. “This is important because most of these methods rely on the preferences defined by the decision maker and if the prescription of these methods does not resemble the actual decisions of the very same decision maker, then something is missing in the sense that the methods are failing in capturing the true decision-making process of the decision maker”, says Dr. Ram. He has developed a novel multi-criteria decision-making method named as Multi-Attribute Gain Loss (MAGL) method which hybridizes the normative MCDA framework with various descriptive theories of decision-making like prospect theory, norm theory, complexity theory, etc.
