Rajendra Akerkar is a professor and coordinator of Big Data and Emerging Technologies research subgroup at Western Norway Research Institute (Vestlandsforsking). He holds Masters in applied mathematics and doctorate in computer science. His research interests include the development and application of Artificial Intelligence methods to real-world challenges in emergency preparedness and management (community resilience, situational awareness, cybersecurity, disaster risk analytics), social cybersecurity (information disorder, information threats, online violence prevention), transport (urban infrastructure systems, policy issues, opportunities and barriers in data driven intelligent transportation and mobility) and energy (data analytics for energy optimization, data-driven decision making, etc.). He aims to combine strong theoretical results with high impact practical results. He has made contributions to semantic technologies and intelligent information systems fields. His research and teaching experience includes over 30 years in academia spanning different institutions in Asia, Europe and North America. He spent the decade 1996-2006 in artificial intelligence and machine learning related research and teaching in India.
He recipient of the DAAD fellowship (Germany) and the prestigious BOYSCASTS Young Scientist award (the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India). He formerly served as the UNESCO-TWAS associate member at Hanoi Institute of Mathematics, Vietnam. He was also DAAD visiting professor at Universität des Saarlandes and University of Bonn, Germany in 2000 and 2007 respectively.
Currently he serves as the Associate Editor of International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies (IJMSO) and Editor of Web Intelligence, an international journal. He serves or has served on the scientific advisory boards for companies and academic institutions, including the Intelligence Research Institute, San Diego, USA (Think Tank that focuses on Technology, Healthcare, and Security). He has also served as chair of organizing and technical committees of numerous conferences, workshops and symposia. He coordinated ISO15926 and Semantic Web Technologies Network, supporting data integration and reasoning, that includes Norwegian universities, the major research institutions and representatives from the public sector, the Oil and Gas industry and the Defense industry. He has served a member of several grant review boards for public agencies and been frequently invited for various national and international grant/award reviews.
His publications include 16 books, 152 research papers, co-edited 2 e-Books and edited 19 volumes of international conferences and workshops. He has led several large collaborative research and innovation projects in the field of artificial intelligence, big data analytics and semantic technologies. He is also actively involved in several transnational ICT initiatives for more than 25 years. In 2010, he initiated a worldwide network on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics.
More information can be found on the subgroup webpages.
