Vikash Kumar Singh

Hiring Doctors in E-Healthcare With Zero Budget.

The doctors (or expert consultants) are the critical resources on which the success of critical medical cases are heavily dependent. With the emerging technologies (such as video conferencing, smartphone, etc.) this is no longer a dream but a fact, that for critical medical cases in a hospital, expert consultants from around the world could be hired, who may be present physically or virtually. Earlier, this interesting situation by taking the expert consultancies from outside the hospital had been studied, but under monetary perspective. In this paper, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we investigate the situation, where the below income group (BIG) people of the society may be served efficiently through the expert consultancy by the renowned doctors from outside of the hospital under zero budget. This will help us saving many lives which will fulfil the present day need of biomedical research. We propose three mechanisms: Random pick-assign mechanism (RanPAM), Truthful optimal allocation mechanism (TOAM), and Truthful optimal allocation mechanism for incomplete preferences (TOAM-IComP) to allocate the doctor to the patient. With theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that the TOAM is strategy-proof, and exhibits a unique core property. The mechanisms are also validated with exhaustive experiments.

Auction aware selection of doctors in E-Healthcare

E-Healthcare system is emerging as one of the most upcoming technologies to provide an efficient and automated healthcare infrastructure. Earlier there had been some works to schedule the internal staffs of a medical unit (may be very large) for working in the operation theater or controlling the outdoor units. However, it is observed that, with the unprecedented growth of the communication media (specially Internet), it may be a common phenomena to hire expert medical staffs (especially doctors) for a critical operation from outside of the medical unit where the operation is taking place. In this paper auction based schemes are proposed for hiring doctors from outside of the medical unit to have the expertise during a critical operation. The schemes are also validated with exhaustive experiments.

A Budget Feasible Mechanism for Hiring Doctors in E-Healthcare

Throughout the past decade, there has been an extensive research on scheduling the hospital resources such as the operation theatre(s) (OTs) and the experts (such as nurses, doctors etc.) inside the hospitals. With the technological growth, mainly advancement in communication media (such as smart phones, video conferencing, smart watches etc.) one may think of taking the expertise by the doctors (distributed around the globe) from outside the in-house hospitals. Earlier this interesting situation of hiring doctors from outside the hospitals has been studied from monetary (with patient having infinite budget) and non-monetary perspectives in strategic setting. In this paper, the more realistic situation is studied in terms of hiring the doctors from outside the hospital when a patient is constrained by budget. Our proposed mechanisms follow the two pass mechanism design framework each consisting of allocation rule and payment rule. Through simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate our proposed mechanisms.

Clustering and Auction in Sequence: A Two Fold Mechanism for Participatory Sensing

Crowdsourcing with smart devices has gained a lot of popularity as a research topic for the last several years. This is commonly known as participatory sensing. In this paper, a double auction mechanism that also circumvents the position (location) information of the participating agents is proposed.

Spectrum Trading in Wireless Communication for Tertiary Market

Number of devices needing wireless communication is more than ever. The main ingredient of wireless communication-the spectrum-is limited and due to the unprecedented growth of smart devices the demand for spectrum is high. To serve all the devices needing wireless communication, intelligent spectrum sensing and its trading has been the hot topic of research in this decade. In spectrum trading, so far in the literature, two layers are considered in terms of primary and secondary users. However, it may be the case, that the secondary users (may be NGOs) may redistribute their spectrum to some third party (downtrodden people of the rural areas) freely. To the best of our knowledge, this environment is not addressed in the literature so far. In this paper this three layer potentially demanding architecture is studied and algorithms are proposed based on the theory of mechanism design without money. Our algorithm is also simulated with a specially designed benchmark algorithm.

Hiring Expert Consultants in E-Healthcare: An Analytics-Based Two Sided Matching Approach

Very often in some censorious healthcare scenario, there may be a need to have some expert consultancies (especially by doctors) that are not available in-house to the hospitals. Earlier, this interesting healthcare scenario of hiring the expert consultants (mainly doctors) from outside of the hospitals had been studied with the robust concepts of mechanism design with money and mechanism design without money. In this paper, we explore the more realistic two sided matching market in our healthcare set-up. In this, the members of the two participating communities, namely the patients and the doctors are revealing the strict preference ordering over the members of the opposite community for a stipulated amount of time. We assume that the patients and doctors are strategic in nature. With the theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that the TOMHECs, that results in the stable allocation of doctors to the patients, satisfies the several economic properties such as strategy-proof-ness (or truthfulness) and optimality. Further, the analytically based analysis of our proposed mechanisms i.e. RAMHECs and TOMHECs are carried out on the ground of the expected distance of the allocation done by the mechanisms from the top most preference. The proposed mechanisms are also validated with the help of exhaustive experiments.

Double Auction Mechanism for Spectrum Trading in Combinatorial Domain

Recently spectrum trading has got a serious attention as it is observed that a significant amount of the spectra that are held by the primary users (spectrum owners or sellers) are remaining un-utilized. Open, market-based spectrum trading motivates the primary users to lease their un-utilized spectrum to new spectrum users (secondary users or buyers) on demand basis. This spectrum trading provides secondary users the spectrum they desperately need. Of late, in wireless communications, auction has played a central role for modelling the reallocation process of the un-utilized spectra that are held by the primary users. In this paper, we propose a truthful double auction mechanism for heterogeneous spectrum. Here, heterogeneity signifies the fact that the secondary users can give demand for the spectrum for multiple primary users. Results from extensive simulation studies demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed work.